Johnathan Daily Swedish-American , b. 1974
Black Rainbow #2, 2013
Oil on canvas
140 x 100 cm
Series: Black Rainbow
Cultures all over the world have and still do use rainbows to symbolize all manner of things, and so in 2012 I thought I’d give people the opportunity to consider...
Cultures all over the world have and still do use rainbows to symbolize all manner of things, and so in 2012 I thought I’d give people the opportunity to consider why. I choose to re-contextualize rainbows by depicting them at night, so that one might see them as if they’d never seen one before. (Later I realized that it wasn’t at night at all – it was in my imagination.) While they clearly belong together as a family of paintings, these are executed in many different ways (a water theme is common), primarily using repeated layers of semitransparent rainbow effects interspersed with semitransparent layers of black. These large canvases are dark and challenging to see but captivating in certain light (they appear to change according to lighting conditions), steeped in heavy deep beneath black, glossy surfaces. They’re meant to offer rainbowness.