Visual Rhythms Set Tone for the Day

A salute to Washington artist Alma Thomas (1891–1978), whose brilliantly colored Red Sunset, Old Pond Concerto is featured today.

Red Sunset, Old Pond Concerto emphasizes the intensity of a sunset as it overtakes a landscape, penetrating layers of greenery to strike darkening water. Broken rows of color pats, a hallmark of her mature style, alternate with emphatic vertical bands. Their irregular intervals create a visual rhythm akin to music, while dappled reds, greens, and blue-blacks orchestrate subtle nuances and dramatic contrasts. Thomas frequently talked about "watching the leaves and flowers tossing in the wind as though they were singing and dancing." She also liked to imagine seeing natural forms from a plane. Her lyrical interpretation of a pond at sunset suggests a blending of these two perspectives.

As a black woman artist, Thomas encountered many barriers; she did not, however, turn to racial or feminist issues in her art, believing rather that the creative spirit is independent of race or gender. In Washington, D.C., where she lived and worked after 1921, Thomas became identified with Morris Louis, Gene Davis, and other Color Field painters active in the area since the 1950s. Like them, she explored the power of color and form in luminous, contemplative paintings.

Source: Excerpted from brochure by Lynda Roscoe Hartigan. African-American Art: Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Selections. (Washington, DC: National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution).

Pictured: Alma Thomas (1891–1978), Red Sunset, Old Pond Concerto,1972, acrylic, 68 1/2 x 52 1/4 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Woodward Foundation.