On the Boardwalk kickstarts the artist’s series entitled Crowd. These paintings celebrate community and the various aspects of gathering. This can mean joining with family and friends or often with the rowdy and randomness of strangers drawn together for concerts, passages, weddings or theater.

This one recognizes the joyous draw to the beach, with its noisy boardwalks, celebratory mood and sun-bleached colors. Cauthen gives the subject a nostalgic twist with the crowd’s clothing, hairstyles and patterns of midcentury.

Early decisions in planning On the Boardwalk included maintaining a high value (light) palette to suggest sunlight. This included the use of pinks and crème yellows to infer light drenched beaches.

Thinking about the way people swerve and sway to move through a throng, Cauthen seeks to create movement through connecting colors and employing gestural line to emphasize this. The perspective from above allows for a vertical composition that congests the design in a playful way.

As with most of her works, Cauthen merges one shape and color into the next to keep the viewer’s attention flowing through the composition mimicking the crowd itself. She pulls out individual shapes and figures to sustain a narrative. (Are figures glancing about? Is this a pair?).

It also reiterates a favorite theme: harmony out of chaos.

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