Collection
Paintings
- Title
- Paintings
- Description
- Paintings in oil, acrylic, wax and gouache, 1964 to 1995: fields, rooms and orchards of the valley, and the color fields they turned into.
Items in this set
-
Doorway in Ochre
The only Ekwall with a way in. The doorway is the canvas left bare; the ochre around it took him eleven coats. -
Ember
Layers of red and orange worked into hot wax until the surface glows from inside, like coals the morning after. -
Field at Dusk
Lind painted the field behind her Harlow studio at the same hour for a whole autumn. The bands are less a horizon than a temperature: warm ground, the rust of last light, and the blue that arrives before the stars. -
Grey Interior
Seven greys, each a little warmer than the last, laid side by side like planks. It hung in the Harlow Savings Bank lobby for thirteen years. -
Hay in Rain
Early and looser than the field paintings, made in one sitting from the studio window. The grey strokes are rain; the ochre mound is the haystack that would not dry. -
Irrigation Ditch
A strip of silver water running straight away from the viewer between two fields of alfalfa. Hollis called it the only straight line in the valley. -
Low Water
Painted the dry August after the dam went in, when the river showed its stones. Lind kept the palette to the colors of wet and dry rock. -
Night Field
A single line of ochre holds the dark together. Lind said it was the porch light at the Halloran farm, seen from the road. -
Orchard, Late
Hollis painted the Paulsen orchard every October for thirty years. In this one the light has nearly gone, and the last apples read as small warm sparks. -
September Field
The first of the field paintings. Lind said she painted the field until it stopped looking like a field and started looking like September. -
Signal
A field of cadmium red interrupted once, off center, by a pale vertical line. Ortiz-Bell painted the line last, in one breath, and would not say what it signals. -
Snowline
Tincup Mountain from the valley floor, the snowline drawn as one unbroken stroke. Hollis left the paper bare for the snow. -
Three Rooms
Ekwall called his geometric paintings floor plans for houses he would never build. Here a black room, a red room and a grey hallway overlap, and none of them has a door.