Pretentious Yet Pointless
This sketch is integral to one of the central preoccupations of Sol Aris's art, the perception of the world of sugar and wine where the relationship of the spectator to the piece is the essential distinction between pattern and texture. Such forms, both monumental and poetic, create a strong interaction of forces. The gently contorted upward soaring components in this work, despite appearing disarmingly simple at first glance, create in the mind deprivations, inhibitions and poverty... In this doodle Sol Aris demonstrates clearly the relationship between summer and winter. It is useful to note that the idea behind Shaker æsthetics is that it enables Sol Aris to define form in terms of dimensionality, rather than representational versimilitude.
The artist uses a limited canvas to restrict the colours, which in this way float free. The painting shares not only Sol Aris's death-identification but also his cosmic perspective and obsession with power. Paradoxically, we see the leading centralism symbolising the inner ego undulate towards the centre of the painting, suggesting inconstancy. In surrealism, the visual phenomena of the objective world are, in themselves, meaningless: the only worthy thing is feeling, as such. The artist does not use a limited canvas to contain the colours, which thus float free.
``The problems dealt with in abstract art relate to the interplay of forces; the geometrical forms often used by abstract artists do not indicate (as has been thought) a conscious and intellectual, mathematical approach -- a square and a circle in art are nothing in themselves and are alive only in the instinctive and ispirational use an artist can make of them in expressing a poetic idea''
[Ben Nicholsen, Notes on Abstract Art, 1942]