Amy Sillman
Letters from Texas (20, 21, 22, 23)
Oil on canvas
66 cm x 558.8 cm (26 in. x 220 in.)
Partial and pledged gift of Jeanne and Michael Klein, 2003
In the spring of 2002, New York-based painter Amy Sillman spent several months working in Texas, where she found the particular quality of the light and the colors of the spring landscape compelling enough to inspire a series of more than thirty small paintings. Titled Letters from Texas, they comprise an assortment of improvisational responses to various sights, events, conversations, and dreams-sort of a diary of self-discovery, structured like correspondence with a friend. Sillman's extraordinary sense of color and her lively, uncensored line animate the four paintings from the series in the Blanton Museum's collection. There's no telling what the floating man signifies, but the informal and irreverent string of free associations is rich with painterly detail, comic incident, and formal complexity. Equal parts goofy and sophisticated, Sillman's work is a fresh amalgam of abstraction and figuration, humor and pathos, narrative and gesture.
