At a glance, Arthur Dove’s forlorn landscape ‘The Other Farm’ (1934), appears to be nothing more than a hastily executed study.
Around 1930, Dove began to actively traverse the landscape around him seeking artistic inspiration. As it struck, he would create small-scale watercolours and gouaches with ink to map out the essentials before returning to his studio to realise them fully. This process of creating ‘small ones’, as he called them, was affectionately referred to by his second wife, Helen Torr, known as Reds, as ‘Arthur’s gone out prowling.’
In spite of their small size, 5 x 7 inches, or smaller, these works have an understated yet outsized delivery within Dove’s artistic output that is just as impactful, often more so, than their finished counterparts. The immediacy of their creation offers a tantalising glimpse into the inner workings of Dove’s creative eye and uniquely showcases the breadth of his compositional and painterly skill, as well as his experimentation.
On closer inspection, ‘The Other Farm’ quickly reveals itself as a triumph of painterly economy and suggestion, characteristic of the innovation central to Dove’s best-known paintings.
Dove structures the composition as three distinct but intertwined bands, our eye drawn between them in the same way that our ear is simultaneously drawn between the melody, chord progression and vocals of a song. In his diaries, Dove referred to his art as ‘music for the eyes’.
Across the top half of the composition, ambiguous shapes are pulled from the precipice of abstraction by outlines in ink that give the illusion of discernible forms, trees, foliage, a farmhouse. This complements the way Dove models the unkempt hedgerow seen in the foreground in wet-on-wet, marbling green and black hues. In stark relief, the central band between these two is akin to a change in time signature in a song. Here, to give a heightened impression of an expansive area of grass, Dove employs vertical rakes with a lightly loaded brush that leaves the paper visible at times.
The dynamism that Dove creates through these wide-ranging applications of watercolour is matched by his choice and employment of colour. The delicate earthy greens and overcast greys, in concert with white flashes of paper beneath, provide a tremendous luminosity to the Geneva, New York, landscape. Meanwhile, the very subtle whispers of greying-blue, golden yellow and a dark maroon strategically placed in the forms in the top half of the work poetically evoke the vibrancy of colour withering as winter encroaches. Yet, their presence, as faint as it may be, is a beacon of hope signalling the certainty of nature’s impending rejuvenation.
The seductive colours Dove uses in ‘Landscape’ (1941), cardinal red, scarlet, blood red, mustard yellow, burnt ochre, and shades of luscious greens, that draw us in like a honey bee to a blossoming flower, belies the largely house-bound existence that Dove’s ill-health had led him to by the time he created it.
The title ‘Landscape’ signifies a direction for our interpretation of the aesthetic components of the composition. However, like many of Dove’s most successful paintings, it is clear that his focus is on trying to visually extract and translate something that’s interior to nature.
In doing this, Dove shifts towards the nonrepresentational working parameters established at the beginning of his career. He toys and wrestles with how far he can push into the visual no man's land where ‘abstraction and reality meet’, as he would write about his renewed area of painterly focus the following year. Colour and form are in a constant dialogue emphasising the fecundity and life inherent to the natural landscape before him, forever adapting and modifying itself, shaped by its own idiosyncratic rhythms, resplendent patterns, and collisions of colour.
The composition is centred around an expanse of water that acts as its nucleus. Rendered in a bitter, dark chocolate brown, it is likely Mill Pond, which Dove’s small house in Centerport, New York, was on the shore of. As this form extends to the top left corner, it twists to a close before reopening up into a smaller black form that suggests the abyss-like depths of nearby Northport Bay which feeds into it. Dove reduces the verdant vegetation that rings the pond to a symphony of geometrically stylised forms in greens and yellows, which plume and appear aglow, as if drenched in sunlight. The reds that Dove employs in zigzagging areas of wild flowering easily allow for a personified symbolism to enhance our interpretation, power, love, attraction, courage, sacrifice, danger. In describing the force of nature, all of these forms densely cover the entire composition, orgiastically intersecting and overlapping one another with a palpable sense of living that Dove was likely ruminating on given his own brushes with mortality.
In the enigmatic ‘Untitled #18’ (1941) and ‘Untitled (Abstraction IV Geometric)’ (1941), Dove returns to a completely non-representational visual lexicon that is fascinating in how two diverse strands of influence, collage and improvisational jazz, can be read into them.
Aware of the experimental collages being produced in European avant-garde movements, and its history within American self-taught art, in the mid to late 1920s, Dove created a series of collages that explored the use of unorthodox materials incorporated into paintings in order to expand describing an object or person. In doing so, he enabled an act of two-dimensional compression to take place that makes the found material fit into the overarching painterly principles that governed the work, while still highlighting its tactility and function in the real world.
Dove can be seen simulating this compression through hard-edged shapes that appear man-made rather than naturally occurring or indicative of nature; a feature which distinguishes them within his painted oeuvre. Consequently, he directs our attention to the relationships between line, form and colour. He teases out an arresting surface tension driven by artistic intuition, mirroring the improvisational elements of jazz songs that he was an ardent listener of.
The focal points of two concentric circles with harmonious and opposing nuances in ‘Untitled #18’, evoke instruments locked in a call and response, vying for sonic superiority. Similarly, the thin black band that extends across the bottom of ‘Untitled (Abstraction IV Geometric)’, reads as a pedal point, above which Dove orchestrates intricate black motifs across the composition that act as syncopated phrases, rising and falling melodiously. Tellingly, Dove once asked rhetorically, ‘Have you ever tried to think how music over the radio would look?
