Artwork Details
- Title
- Light Blue Nursery
- Artist
- Date
- 1968
- Location
- Not on view
- Dimensions
- 49 x 47 7⁄8 in. (124.4 x 121.5 cm)
- Credit Line
- Gift of the artist
- Mediums
- Mediums Description
- acrylic on canvas
- Classifications
- Highlights
- Keywords
- Abstract
- Object Number
- 1970.324
Artwork Description
The chromatic impact of Light Blue Nursery is dramatic. Small blocks of irregularly configured primary colors dance across a bright white surface in horizontal rows that echo the ordered energy of a formal garden. Secondary and tertiary hues – pinks, purples, and greens – serve as borders and accents, reflecting Thomas’s conviction that she could play with perception and optical interaction in images drawn from her visual experience of the natural world. Although seemingly constructed of spontaneous strokes of the brush, the forms, like the colors, are thoughtfully calibrated.
African American Art: Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights Era, and Beyond, 2012
During the 1960s, African American painter Alma Thomas emerged as an exuberant colorist and member of the Washington Color Field School, abstracting shapes and patterns from the trees and flowers around her and creating works that shimmer with color. “Color is life," Thomas once explained. "Light reveals to us the spirit and living soul of the world through colors.” She produced some of her most important works in this decade, including Light Blue Nursery. The rhythmic horizontal lines of bright blues, reds, yellows, and greens are offset by white areas of untouched raw canvas, creating a jewel-like mosaic.
". . . through my impressions of nature . . . I hoped to impart beauty, joy, love, and peace." The artist, quoted in Van Vechten, Recent Painting by Alma W. Thomas: Earth and Space Series, Exhibition Catalogue, Gallery of Fine Arts, 1971
Exhibitions
