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A Bad Omen?

Once considered a bad omen, the moon crosses in front of the sun today in an annual solar eclipse.

Depicting today's mysterious phenomenon, this artwork by Alma Thomas has a decidedly joyful tone.

Alma Thomas began to paint seriously in 1960, when she retired from her thirty-eight year career as an art teacher in the public schools of Washington, D.C. In the years that followed, she would come to be regarded as a major painter of the Washington Color Field School.

The Eclipse of 1970 conveys Thomas's ability to imply movement and form in an abstract work, inspired by natural phenomenon that she witnessed. Concentric circular patterns of yellow, gold, red, orange, purple, blue, and green are organized around a central blue vortex that represents the sun. The off-center compositional arrangement and the circle's arbitrarily cut off right edge create a design that appears to slide off the canvas at the very moment of the sun's total eclipse.

Source: Regenia A. Perry. Free within Ourselves: African-American Artists in the Collection of the National Museum of American Art (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art in Association with Pomegranate Art Books, 1992).

Pictured: Alma Thomas, 1891–1978, The Eclipse, 1970, acrylic on canvas, 62 x 49 3/4 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the artist.