“Northern lights & lightning,” by Dana Gordon

“Northern lights & lightning,” by Dana Gordon

To understand a painting, you start by looking. That is enough. But, of course, there are different contexts in which to consider it. There is the history of all painted images, the local artistic tradition, the most recent movement or contemporary trend, and so on. One such context is the tradition of Abstract Expressionism, a revolutionary branch of modernism that flourished initially in the mid-1940s and through the 1950s. The movement is als…