ABOUT THE ART

This large, colorful painting is filled with bold brushstrokes that appear to have been quickly created. Layers of paint combine in this abstract composition to create areas of rough color that communicate a mood. Both vibrant and muted colors provide contrast and a sense of shifting space. Horizontal shapes at the top and bottom frame a boxier blue-gray shape set against a red background. The rapidly applied paint reveals the movement of the artist’s hand or gesture, almost like a quick signature. A1t lends itself to many interpretations. Sometimes artists give us clues to possible meanings in their titles. Others don’t want to influence our personal understanding of an artwork by using title words. Interpretations can range from concrete, literal speculations of what objects Booth’s image might depict to more metaphoric or abstract ideas of what this painting might be expressing.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Cameron Booth worked and taught generations of artists in Minnesota. Booth started as a landscape artist and moved toward abstraction in his work. While in Europe in the 1920s, Booth was a student of German-born painter Hans Hofmann, who eventually immigrated to New York and sparked the popularity of abstract expressionism there. Hofmann influenced Booth’s use of bold color and gestural painting. Through his work and teaching, Booth helped to spread these artistic ideas to his students in the upper Midwest.

Vocabulary

Abstract – a style of at1 that does not directly mimic the appearance of objects from the natural world, but instead is composed of simplified shapes, forms, or color to express ideas, experience, or emotion.

Abstract Expressionism -a painting style that developed in the middle of the twentieth century noted for bold gestural marks, simplified forms, and large-scale images.