This is not an angle at which I would usually like to address a Mack truck, but such a truck presented itself a few days ago silent and blessedly at rest. The strong horizontal lines, not only of the grill but also of the head lamp and front line of the fender, make a plain statement: get out of the way. The message is underscored by being delivered in black, white, and chrome, vast visual acreage for a cemetery of flying insects.
It gave me pause, having to think about whether I wanted to use such an unadorned image for tritone. Experimentation being the order of the week, I trudged ahead and was rewarded for my efforts with a view even more threatening. In this tritone, one seems to meet the truck after dark. Who knows whether the engine is cold?
The horizontal statement is, if anything, even stronger. In a palette that would ordinarily be considered muted, in the dark the truck seems to have retooled itself even more dangerously.
Wanting to position the “k” at the left edge of the photo, I tried to crop carefully in the camera. In addition to the diagonal established by the camera’s tilt, the diagonal line along the fender seems nearly parallel with diagonals of the “k”.
Something that frustrates me about this arrangement is that it has no “up”. Regardless of the edge chosen as the top, numbers and letters work against each other. What I do find appealing is the orange blade holder sitting jauntily along the ruler’s hard, but not exactly straight, line. If it is the only thing available to cut an undeviating margin, good luck! The handle of the blade also breaks the unrelieved horizontal lines (surely the ruler’s hatch marks would not count as true verticals).
In tritone someone has run amok with metallic spray paint or perhaps these are an array of found objects sprayed and put forth as a screed against materialism. I think I prefer the chaotic explanation, because it allows me to enjoy without guilt how gold highlights numbers and manages to polish the already gilded letters. The chaotic explanation might even proclaim a sybaritic enjoyment of the richness of purple enhanced by precious yellow metal.
It is more than the imagined back story that guides my preference to the tritoned photo. Where the bright patches hardly matter in the multiplicity of color, in the tritone they become an important design element, interrupting and simultaneously supporting the laterals. When an inkjet becomes capable of spraying little specks of gold leaf, this one might be worth a try.
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