An early oil painting by Thomas Sills, an underrecognized midcentury abstract practitioner, Travel is characteristic of the artist’s work from the period. The centralized composition, seemingly infused by an inner light that emanates outward, alludes to the natural world as well as Sills’s childhood working in a greenhouse in the American South. Encouraged by his wife, mosaic artist Jeanne Reynal, and their mutual friend Willem de Kooning, Sills began painting in the 1950s without formal training. He chose to utilize rags instead of brushes to generate his painting’s soft and luminous blends of pigment.

Oil on canvas.

J. Atwood and Elizabeth Ives Purchase Fund. © 2023 Estate of Thomas Sills / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

2022.1308