"There is excitement in planning a movement around a pivot, in, out, and across the picture plane to plot a design which is vibrant with harmonic life.”
—Grace Frame Martin Taylor
The modern aesthetic of Star Gazing demonstrates Grace Frame Martin Taylor’s embrace of Cubism, a modality introduced to Taylor by her cousin and fellow Provincetown Printer Blanche Lazzell, along with the beginnings of her own visual vocabulary, which would continually be punctuated by impulses towards the curvilinear. Star Gazing’s setting is rendered in a particularly Cubist fashion, flat planes of unmodulated color recalling the Synthetic Cubism of Albert Gleizes, from whom Lazzell took lessons while in Paris. However, while the Cubists relied on more muted hues of browns and greys, Taylor has inflected her Cubist environment with highlights of yellow and gradated bright green, resulting in figures and forms that exude a moonlike glow.
Central to the scene are two nude figures, the pair crucial in crafting a design both vibrant and harmonious. At once Cubist and sinuous, Taylor’s nudes marry geometric simplification and angular shadowing with curvilinear forms; their bodies rendered with soft curvature, and the compositional balance of their poses form a circular line that echoes their surrounding orb-like forms. Emphasizing the contrast between Taylor’s curvilinear and straight lines, the white-line woodcut technique encourages a viewer’s eye to subtly move around this abstracted scene, accentuating Taylor’s adept ability in constructing uniquely graceful compositions.
