Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art

About this Work

A noted Color-field painter, Felrath Hines also produced a significant number of works on paper. The artist carefully planned his works. Although this pastel seems simple, Hines used a graph paper study (also in Eskenazi Museum of Art's collection, 2009.30) to make sure that the geometry was precise. While his later paintings are abstract in theme, his graphic works often allude to the natural world in their compositions and titles.

The pastel with its splayed triangles in various shades of tan for a tail, small cream-colored triangle for a head, larger yellow triangle for the body, and arched orange and pink shapes for wings suggests an abstracted peafowl. The soft texture created by the pastel medium on a toothy paper contrasts with the hard-edged aesthetic frequently associated with minimalism and adds a playful, child-like quality to the drawing, as does the unusual choice of colors for the peacock’s plumage.