MASS MoCA

News From Somewhere

by Franchesca Kiesling

March 10^th, 2014

Review of News From Nowhere by Darren Waterston

Oil on wood panel (40 x 44 inches)

            Swirls and swoops mixed with darks and lights; this painting captures your eyes at just a glance and keeps you there trying to determine what the meaning may be. Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA for short) has some tremendous artwork within the 144,000 square feet of space, but Darren Waterston’s exceeds the rest. He doesn’t need enormous walls or thousands of square feet of space. All Waterston needs is some oil and a wood panel as seen in News From Nowhere.

            In the exhibit Uncertain Beauty (available until January 2015), many types of works are displayed including an entire room. The multi-media paintings on different canvases are the real capturers, though. News From Nowhere, painted in 2012, captures amazing detail in the brush strokes of his work. The strokes are light and almost transparent in the foreground of the piece, and delicate lines of white outline those transparent strokes. This foreground is the main view of the piece and it is basically two bubbling bouncing lines with what can be conceived as brains bubbling off the lines. While the onlooker may not understand the piece at first site, Darren Waterston’s work is more figurative and abstract than anything else. In the background of the piece is a red-ish orange-ish base color and then in the far distance there is what looks like a dark bubbly textured city in the bottom right hand corner. Since the title is News From Nowhere the reader can imagine what is actually going on. The brain-looking swoops are different cities in a nation giving their up and coming ideas for a new world, while the dark and gloomy background city is the overall nation slipping away and turning more into the foreground cities. This may be a far-fetched idea, but lookers of this piece do not have to interpret the piece to enjoy it. The complexity of the strokes and the affective use of only two or three colors really make this piece accessible to everyone.

            Darren Waterston is an American artist with his pieces all over the nation. He has several different subjects he paints from and is very inspired by future nations, anguish and uncertainty in his life. He has had his work shown in several different museums ranging from Hawaii to Texas to even Massachusetts since the 1990’s. Darren Waterston is an incredible artist and every person, all over the United States can enjoy his simple, elegant pieces of art.