Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Alma Thomas
American; 20th-century
New York, NY: Michael Rosenfeld Gallery (Exhibition: 18 Women: 50 Years)
75%
Spring No. 2. 1968. Acrylic on canvas
If this piece is any indication, Thomas's use of color is almost a feint: failure and success lie in her negative space, in how she approaches almost a draftsmanship by making arrangements out of the interstices between her painted daubs. Here, there are two mostly discrete, occasionally interacting descending/ascending zigzag patterns that zip up and down the right and left halves of the canvas; by turns these unpainted white "lines" arc and jut, slope and fall away. What is unclear is whether Thomas's colors and their combinations interact sufficiently with their white substrate, which is actually the painting's substance. The return to reds at the canvas's right side after a foray into less grounded blues, purples, yellows, and greens suggests that, yes, figure and ground are in deliberate cahoots. The way this return seems to bound the back-and-forth of the white, which pops through most from behind brighter colors like yellow, is evidence. (2024)
New York, NY: Michael Rosenfeld Gallery (Exhibition: 18 Women: 50 Years)
44%
Untitled. 1958. Oil on canvas
Present are several of the things that eventually came to make Thomas a worthwhile painter: juxtaposed daubs of different masses of color; a general regularity to the shapes of those daubs that is undercut by so many little particularities to the ways they're formed. However, most of what makes up this painting was to be strained out of Thomas's approach, and for the best. First, the flatness of her mature works predicates how busy they're able to get away with being, but here there's a tactility to the painted surface that overpowers its already rather powerful arrangement. Second, the famous unmixed quality of Thomas's later colors is what allows the space between them to take on so much charge, but here everything is blended and therefore muddled. Finally, this piece has very little drawing to it. Thomas is best when she "draws" with the spaces between her shapes, so the crowding of this canvas's forms leaves it with very little. (2024)