Erika Holmquist-Wall

The human figure in still life, he returns to them again and again and again throughout his career. And he uses them as a springboard to experiment with fundamentals of shape, of color, of line, composition, weight, volume. Look at the wavy lines on the wallpaper; how they pick up the wavy lines on the pewter jug and on her rob. The straight bold stripes on the gray carpet and how they echo the stripes on the wallpaper in the back, how the black dots on her necklace pick up the buttons on her coat and the black centers of the anemones. It’s so quintessentially Matisse, he is working very, very hard to make something look very simple and very easy. I think it’s like a transition point; he is evolving into something, else entirely.

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