cavetocanvas:

Arthur Dove, That Red One, 1944

From the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston:

The genesis of That Red One was a tiny watercolor, about three by four inches (7.6 by 10.2 centimeters), which Dove most likely painted while sitting in his car. Like the landscape painters of the nineteenth century, Dove sketched from nature constantly, and these sketches (and the large paintings he based on them) reflect his translation of what he saw into simple colors and shapes. By the 1940s he had moved from a biomorphic, linear style to forms that were geometric and colors that were bold, flat, and clear. That Red One, with its brownish-purple oval hovering over two red bars and angled shapes of intense yellow, orange, and blue, probably represents a mundane subject—a view through trees across a pond at sunrise. The result, however, was triumphant. Dove spoke about wanting to show the “point where abstraction and reality meet,” and in doing so he created an icon of modern art, a vision of nature that is both evocative and timeless.