The Art of Orange and Yellow
Visual Essay
Autumn Trees - The White Birch
Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986), American
Oil on canvas, 30" x 36" (w x h), 1924
Private Collection
Source: VariousPrivate Collection
This was painted at Alfred Steiglitz family's summer home at Lake George, New York in the fall of 1924. A few months later she married Alfred on December 11, 1924. This was the 1920s when Georgia visited York Beach, Maine for more than ten weeks to paint solo, in what was to be the precursor to her move to New Mexico.
Shadows
Susan Tormoen (1936) American
Pastel, circa 2011
Pikes Peak Pastel Society Pastels Plus Exhibit
Susan Tormoen, born in 1936, has a B. A. in philosophy, Lake Forest College, Lake Forest, Illinois. She's a signature member of the Pikes Peak Pastel Society, Colorado Springs, CO. This 2011 pastel was part of the Pikes Peak Pastel Society Pastels Plus Exhibit at the High Vista Fine Art Gallery, El Pueblo History Museum, Pueblo, CO.
Summer Sunlight
Beatrice Whitney Van Ness (1888-1981), American
Oil on canvas, circa 1936
The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC
Beatrice Whitney Van Ness (1888-1981) studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1905. In 1908 she received a scholarship from the Museum School and joined the faculty two years later. Around 1909 she took summer classes with Charles H. Woodbury in Ogunquit, Maine. He went on to become her mentor for many years. In 1915 she married businessman Carl N. Van Ness, and with him summered in Ogunquit and North Haven, Maine. In 1921 she founded the art department of Beaver Country Day School in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, remaining on its faculty until 1949. The Beaver Country Day School founded the Beatrice Van Ness Society in the painter's memory. Her papers are held by the Archives of American Art.
Summer Sunlight (circa 1936), most likely occurred at her island home in Bartlett Harbor in North Haven, Maine. It depicts her older daughter who is in the center wearing a large hat, her nephew Winthrop Stearns who has his back to the viewer and her neighbor, Barbara Allen, who has a yellow banana in her hand. The subject of the painting, however, is the bright sunlight that pervades throughout the painting. Regarding the composition, forms are echoed throughout. A shard of yellow that cuts into the rim of the umbrella is echoed in the shard of cloud that cuts into the same umbrella and is repeated in the barely visible triangular sail. The blue in Allen's bathing suit is repeated in a brighter tone in the triangle of oceanic blue at the upper left corner. The brown umbrella support serves as an anchor to the composition and also isolates the young man from the women's half of the painting. The ascending progression of heads from right to left and the parallel diagonal of the edge of the umbrella are the most pronounced diagonals that give the scene motion.
Lilies Against Yellow House
Alex Katz (1927- ) American
Oil paint on hardboard, 9" x 12", 1983
Tate and National Galleries of Scotland,
Edinburgh, Scotland
Katz has placed colorful lilies against the institutional brickwork of his summer house in Lincolnville. He has been painting flowers since the 1960s, often painted during summer residencies in Maine. The cropped, flattened composition displays a debt to Japanese art. Katz is well known for his large paintings, whose bold simplicity and heightened colors are now seen as precursors to Pop Art. Small oil paintings such as this one are sketched from life and often intended to be scaled up into larger works, but their economic execution and visible brush strokes reveal an intimate side to his practice. He says, "A sketch is very direct. It is working empirically, inside of an idea."
Orange Barn
Wolf Kahn (1927-2020), German born American
Pastel, 2010
Wolf Kahn (1927-2020) worked in oil and pastel. His works usually are landscapes and his own personal vision of nature. His use of light and color has been described as combining "pictorial landscapes and painterly abstraction." In 1956, he met fellow painter Emily Mason and married 1957 in Venice. They lived in New York City. In 1963 they moved to Italy where their second daughter was born. In 1968 they bought a farm in Brattleboro, Vermont, where they continued to summer and work. In 2005 the Smithsonian Art Collectors Program commissioned Kahn to produce a print to benefit the cultural and educational programs of the Smithsonian Associates. The screenprint, entitled Aura, hangs in the Graphic Eloquence exhibit in the S. Dillon Ripley Center on the National Mall.
Untitled (for Vincent)
Alma Thomas (1891-1978), American
Oil on canvas, 1976
Sold at the 2016 Exposition opening, $475,000 USD
ConnerSmith, Washington DC
Alma Woodsey Thomas (1891-1978) was an African-American artist and art teacher who lived and worked in Washington, DC, and is now recognized as a major American painter of the 20th century. She is the first African-American woman to be included in the White House's permanent art collection. Thomas is best known for her "exuberant", colorful, abstract paintings that she created after she retired from a 35-year career teaching art at Washington's Shaw Junior High School. Thomas worked in her home studio, a small living room, creating her paintings by "propping the canvas on her lap and balancing it against the sofa." She worked out of the kitchen in her house, creating works like Watusi (Hard Edge) (1963), a manipulation of the Matisse cutout The Snail, in which Thomas shifted shapes around and changed the colors that Matisse used, and named it after a Chubby Checker song.
Yellow/Orange
Ellsworth Kelly (1923-2015), American
Color lithograph, edition of 75, 41" x 35" (w x h), 1970
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA
Kelly used the G.I. Bill to study from 1946-47 at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where he took advantage of the museum's collections, and then at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. While in Paris, Kelly continued to paint the figure but by May 1949, he made his first abstract paintings. Observing how light dispersed on the surface of water, he painted Seine (1950), made of black and white rectangles arranged by chance. Kelly's discovery in 1952 of Monet's late work infused him with a new freedom of painterly expression. He began working in extremely large formats and explored the concepts of seriality and monochrome paintings. From then on he painted in an exclusively abstract mode.
Schoodic Sunrise
Philip Frey (1967- ), American
Oil on linen, 30" x 24" (w x h), 2024
Philip Frey studied at Columbus College of Art and Design and graduated with a Bachelor's of Fine Arts in Painting from Syracuse University in 1990. He paints Maine's harbors and islands with a bold palette that captures the light and moods of his home state, from the streets of Ellsworth and Portland to Monhegan and Acadia National Park. "I make paintings inspired by the landscape, architecture, interior spaces and the figure... I pay close attention to the ephemeral qualities of light, color and pattern that often go unnoticed. My process involves the use of brushes, palette knives and squeegees to develop a rich paint surface and abstractions that evoke a sense of momentariness and appreciation for "the life of things." He lives in downeast Sullivan, Maine, where he maintains a full-time studio nestled in the woods. His artist's website is HERE.
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