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Peas Be with You!

Start the year off right with some black-eyed peas!

Eating black-eyed peas on New Year's Day is a southern tradition that promises good luck and prosperity through the year. Once you've set yourself on the road to prosperity, let Barry Dalgleish's painting inspire you to new order and structure in your life.

During the late 1970s Barry Dalgleish began a series of paintings, based on studies of symmetry, in which he creates strict formal compositions from recognizable subjects, often small still lifes set into interior spaces. He reduces shapes to their geometric fundamentals and controls pictorial elements through carefully determined lighting effects. Simple, generic titles dispel narrative associations although subtitles frequently describe a mood or specify time of day. Connections between painted and actual space are achieved by the realistically painted doorjambs and shutters that often frame Dalgleish's canvases.

Source: Virginia M. Mecklenburg. Modern American Realism: The Sara Roby Foundation Collection (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Museum of American Art, 1987).

Pictured: Barry Dalgleish, born Canada 1951, Interior with Still Life—New Year's Day, 1981, oil and acrylic, 65 3/4 x 48 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Sara Roby Foundation.