Hope 2008

Here is the story of Hope in oil on canvas by Robert Indiana. It’s all about geometry, rhythm, and the relationships between shapes and letters, isn’t it? You’ve got the word “HOPE” stacked, leaning like it’s about to fall over – but maybe that’s just the point, that hope always feels a bit precarious? I think about Indiana in his studio, carefully placing each block of color, red against blue, white creating negative space and hard edges. You see a similar approach to form in the work of artists such as Jasper Johns and Ellsworth Kelly. They are all in dialogue. The blue oval in the ‘O’ feels like a tiny planet, a focal point, but maybe it’s a pill? I wonder what Indiana was feeling or thinking when he made this work. Maybe he was thinking about the history of signs and symbols, or how we give meaning to language through color and form. But who knows, really? That's the beauty of painting – it’s an open-ended question, an invitation.