Arthur Dove

“I would like to make something that is real in itself,” [Arthur Dove] once wrote, “that does not remind anyone of any other thing, and that does not have to be explained like the letter A, for instance.

“What do we call ‘America’ outside of painting?” he asked a friend. “Inventiveness, restlessness, speed, change. Well, a painter may put all these qualities in a still life or an abstraction, and be going more native than another who sits quietly copying a skyscraper.”

“I no longer observed in the old way, and not only began to think subjectively but also to. remember certain sensations purely through their form and color, that is, by certain shapes, planes of light….”

Arthur Dove was interested in synesthesia – the possibility that sounds could be experienced and depicted as colors or shapes, an idea current in French Symbolist circles since the 1880s. Foghorns, 1929, represents the moaning of warning sirens in the Long Island mist as concentric rings of paint growing in lightening tones of grayed pink from a dark center: the bell mouths of the horns, their peculiar resonance, and the color of the fog are fused in one image.
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