Continuity
This conversation is connected to Continuity.
Interlocking shapes in dark green, yellow, mauve, brown, black, and chartreuse fit together like a puzzle or a topographic map. A large yellow form rises at the upper right, anchoring the composition against a field of deep forest green. Below it, curved planes of rose-brown, gray-purple, and dark brown overlap and nest into one another, with a band of bright yellow-green running across the bottom. The shapes are organic, their edges soft and curving, and the whole painting has the quality of a landscape seen from above or a cross-section of earth. Dove was one of the first American painters to work in pure abstraction, beginning as early as 1910. He spent much of his life on boats and in small towns along the Long Island Sound, and his abstractions are almost always rooted in nature, the forms derived from hills, clouds, water, and weather even when no specific subject is identifiable.