NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

This booklet of Romanian astrodrawings and astropoems is produced by SARM (The Romanian Society for Meteors and Astronomy) to promote artistic astrographics.

The elements of design with which artists work are the observable properties of matter: line, shape and form, space, texture, value (lights and darks) and lighting, colour and time. Although these elements are unified in works of art, we isolate and deal with them one at a time. Here the specific elements to note are line, shape, form, light and dark.

The line in art, and the function it serves, is seen in many of the pieces in this booklet. Lines may be seen as unworked as well as worked areas of design.

In Joana Grigore's drawing to represent the muse, we can see not only black lines on white but also white lines defined by black-inked areas. Grigore handles the rapid transition from the white of the face to the white lines defining the hair with aplomb.

Even more subtly, we perceive the lines in Elena Sorescu's drawings of the dead moon. She uses most often thin parallel lines. Viewers can respond spiritually to this linear drawing as if they were seeing luminous space.

Some lines are not physically created; they are merely suggested by the artist. Our mind, with its penchant for trying to read order into the messages from the senses, does the rest, perceiving lines where there are none. Part of the visual excitement of Valentin Grigore's starry sky is the filling in of what has been left out. Just enough information is given for us to see what the artist has in mind. The illusion works well particularly in the right hand figure stretching towards the sun almost like a hand reaching for the stars.

The poems that these drawings illustrate are by the artists themselves.

Tina Visarian's poem

	Spines grew up in the Universe
	provoking pain . . .

is illustrated by an almost Mondrian-like tree, a representative depiction of what appears to be a fruit-bearing tree, with interplay among the lines of the main branches that turn into hands grasping at stars and planets. The branches and stars form a rhythmic series of arcs, echoing and counterbalancing the stars that have fallen to earth.

Eliza Trandafir's

	Trite testimonies
	of the immense Universe . . .

The newest frontier in art is cyberspace, and in this booklet the computer age is represented by three pieces. Art in cyberspace creates a world of new possibilities. Just as early art photographs tried to imitate paintings, so computer graphics attempt to imitate photographs. Calin Niculae's "THE DREAM OF AN ASTEROID" is a case in point.

Here the computer image reminds one of a barren landscape illuminated by a white shape: an iceberg, perhaps? The viewer can be seduced by the effects as the artist communicates his or her feelings through representations of familiar objects from the real world in a surrealistic mode.

A worthwhile little publication, then, bringing to the forefront some of the younger and also some of the more established artists of Romania working under extreme hardship in today's society.