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Katherine PorterNashville is an Enigma, mixed media painting by renowned female artist, signed1986
1986
About the Item
Katherine Porter
Country Music (Nashville is an Enigma), 1986
Mixed media; colored pencil, gouache, and graphite on paper, uniquely signed and inscribed with Nashville dateline
Hand signed and personally inscribed with a dateline of Nashville, TN
Frame Included
Measurements:
Frame:
23.5 x 31.5 x 1.25 inches
Artwork:
20 x 28 inches
Provenance: Obelisk Gallery Boston (with original label verso)
Excerpt from May, 2024, New York Times obituary on Katherine Porter:
Katherine Porter, Painter of Intuitive Expressionism, Dies at 82
Her palette was entirely personal, making contact with the natural world just long enough to spirit viewers back into her own psychology.
Ms. Porter used a standard, if slightly idiosyncratic, vocabulary of early modernist abstraction: thick, freely floating steps, curves and spirals; triangles, squares and a plethora of circles; occasional incursions into meaning and representation, like snippets of writing, depictions of barbed wire or shapes that evoke buildings, weather or pointed arch windows; and stormy collisions of these elements that seemed to have overflowed onto the canvas under their own power.
What was distinctive about Ms. Porter’s version was its large scale, its unmistakably unfiltered quality — and its color.
Unlike the figurative Expressionists, who altered colors to heighten their emotional effects, or the purely Abstract Expressionists, for whom colors had meaning only on canvas, Ms. Porter had a palette that was entirely personal, making contact with the natural world just long enough to spirit viewers back into her own psychology.
In “Fire, Water, Sun and Moon,” a 1979 canvas more than 11 feet long that belongs to the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, a diagonal wave of curling blue lines shoots across the frame while a small yellow sun in the upper right corner shines in vain against a troubled pink sky. Pink sky and blue waves spark a sense of recognition — but toppling gold and lavender towers above the wave, and a thrumming black circle beneath, transform the scene from an external place to an interior vision.
“New York Number,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is divided into red, white, orange and black quarters that support a vibrant, mosaic-like rectangular procession of little dashes in roughly the colors of the larger sections, with the addition of light blue. It doesn’t quite harmonize, but it isn’t distinctly dissonant either. Instead, the piece conveys a lingering emotional turmoil.
A recent retrospective at LewAllen Galleries, filled with smoky oranges, cloudy blues and unexpected grays, was titled “Brilliance of Spontaneity Untamed.” The gallery credited those words to a remark made by the Picasso scholar Lydia Csato Gasman.
What was beyond doubt was Ms. Porter’s devotion to her approach. After describing her, in New York magazine in 1987, as “someone who has never tempered a brushstroke or bothered to suppress a wayward impulse,” Kay Larson went on to suggest that Ms. Porter had, “by sheer endurance and grit, turned her art’s weaknesses into a kind of signature.”
Ms. Porter was awarded honorary doctorates by Colby College and Bowdoin College, and her paintings appeared in the Whitney Biennial in 1973 and 1981. In New York, in addition to Mr. McKee, Sydney Janis and Andre Emmerich showed her work. It has been collected by the Whitney Museum, the Guggenheim, the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
After moving to Boston, Ms. Porter lived a peripatetic life. In 1976 she moved to Belfast, Maine, where she converted a former hardware store into a studio and lived above it. She also spent nearly a decade in Montreal, with summers in Nova Scotia; visited the Galápagos Islands with her first husband and Buenos Aires with her second; made annual trips to Provence; returned to Maine; used a rented loft in New York as a home base for visiting-artist work nearby; and, just last year, relocated to Santa Fe in hopes that the weather would help her arthritis.
In Maine she met the photographer Rudy Burckhardt and the painters Alex Katz and Rackstraw Downes, among others, and exchanged many visits with the painter Jake Berthot in Belfast. She withdrew somewhat from the commercial art world in the late 1990s, but she never stopped painting.
“If I’m not working,” she explained in the video interview, “I just feel like an unmoored crazy person.”
About Katherine Porter:
Katherine Porter (1941-2024) is an American artist. Born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa in 1941, Porter is considered one of the most important contemporary artists associated with Maine. She resists categorization. Through the medium of painting and drawing her visually stunning canvases convey the conflict inherent in life. She expresses her ideas with a visual vocabulary that is "geometric and gestural, abstract and figurative, decorative and raw, lyric and muscular."
Porter has shown twice in the Whitney Biennial and solo exhibitions at the Knoedler Gallery in London, the Nina Nielsen Gallery in Boston, and the Andre Emmerich and Salander-O'Reilly Galleries in New York. Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the Tel Aviv Museum in Jerusalem. She currently resides in Maine.
- Creator:Katherine Porter (1941, American)
- Creation Year:1986
- Dimensions:Height: 23.5 in (59.69 cm)Width: 31.5 in (80.01 cm)Depth: 1.25 in (3.18 cm)
- Medium:
- Movement & Style:
- Period:
- Condition:In overall good condition, with minor pinholes to both upper corners, and minor tear to the right edge, not examined out of frame.
- Gallery Location:New York, NY
- Reference Number:1stDibs: LU1745215086462
Katherine Porter
Katherine Porter (1941) is an American artist. Born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa in 1941, Porter is considered one of the most important contemporary artists associated with Maine. She resists categorization. Through the medium of painting and drawing her visually stunning canvases convey the conflict inherent in life. She expresses her ideas with a visual vocabulary that is "geometric and gestural, abstract and figurative, decorative and raw, lyric and muscular."
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