Word: motif
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...football fields, which sports computer-controlled water chambers that empty out in a torrent of 4-ft. waves simulating ocean surf. High above on Mount May Day teeters a replica of a wrecked fishing boat that periodically spouts a spray of water. In keeping with the typhoon motif, one artfully ramshackle building has a motorboat impaled on the roof...
...painting being so much more than its subject, you can't pin down an artist by naming his favorite motif. From Mondrian and the Russian constructivists on, many an abstract artist has gone for the stripe in all its apparent simplicity -- the line that baldly, mysteriously becomes a form in itself. Yet their paintings are not like one another's: there is no confusing the precise black vibration of a Bridget Riley with the effect of one of Barnett Newman's "zips" or the slightly blurred, funereal pinstriping of an early Frank Stella. Today the stripe continues to linger...
...cogitation -- how the life of the mind and its tentative decisions could be embodied, not just illustrated, in pigment. And there had been a visit to Morocco in 1970; there Scully saw stripes everywhere, dyed into awnings and djellabas and bolts of cloth, not a theoretical form but a motif embedded, as it were, in the landscape. Then he moved to New York and, as he puts it in the catalog, felt driven to paint "severe, invulnerable canvases, so I could be in this environment and not feel exposed. I spent five years making my paintings fortress-like...
...graduated from the college of Cliff- Hanger U. I ought to have paid tuition." Spielberg's camera style neither misses a trick nor reveals how it's done. See how he cues the change of a Zeppelin's course by the shadow scampering across a cocktail glass; watch a motif of cigarette lighters carry complicity from one character to another. Like a fine old haunted castle, his film has secret staircases of suspense, revolving panels of plot...
...devil make her do it? Who cares? Don't try to read too much into every frog, dog and December Bee motif in Woman in Mind. It's just fun to watch. Even sober...