David Bernstein’s Red Paint Lid surprises and delights me. As he has photographed it, that bright red, gleaming elliptical form lying flat on those rusted, angular steel beams leaps out of the surrounding space. Then there is that one rivulet of red paint, dripping down the side and spreading across the beam. While that drip descends, it also seems to raise the lid to the light. Rising and falling are inseparable.
There is something disorderly about the lid of a paint can that is wet and dripping, but the form itself is a perfect ellipse. The rusty and mottled beams are also perfect angular geometric forms. Perfection and imperfection are made one.
We need to see, as the photographer did, that form, order can be found in disorder. It made me think of what Eli Siegel described so wonderfully in his poem “The Lesson of Art”:
Within debris
Is symmetry.
—Marcia Rackow