Between the Lines

Lines can be a pictorial element, lines can form patterns and shapes, lines can lead your eyes to specific subject, and lines can help you frame your subject.  Lines are to be read leading and transforming complexity to simple composition.  Hence it takes a really good eye to read between the lines. 

Lines are the architecture of the Holocaust Memorial - lines are everywhere. There are the long horizontal lines of names, all the victims lost. These lines are the background to the human figures sculpted at the heart of the memorial. Everywhere you look, behind and through the bronze figures, the names of the dead fill in your view.

The last name in the list is Zusha Mamber, and whild that line stops abruptly, the story isn't finished.  The memorial leaves plenty of blank black granite where more names can be added at families' request.                                                                                               

A trip through the entire memorial takes you around in a circle, but straight lines in its design keep visitors moving in the right direction. Diagonal lines of stone point toward the giant hand and the tortured figures climbing up its arm at the heart of the memorial. Narrow shafts of light shift throughout the day in the tunnel that leads to that hand. These lines do more than guide visitors, they pull them toward the memorial's center of grief.


JKay