Starry Night and the Astronauts
Alma Thomas
ALMA THOMAS, 1972. ACRYLIC ON CANVAS.
Alma Thomas never flew in an airplane, but as she aged, she began to dream of the skies and see the world from above. She started her artistic journey as a figurative artist, before adopting a more abstract approach and then, in the 1960s, she transformed once again and developed a style uniquely her own. Taking elements of pointillism, inspiration from Byzantine mosaics and West African painting, and finding thematic subjects in the burgeoning American Space Program, Thomas elevated her color-field painting into something altogether unique. Here, in the expanse of blue, where each brushstroke seems to shimmer and the glimpses of raw canvas below become flickering stars in the night sky, the small pool of red and orange burn bright as if a sign of life in the vastness. The flat canvas comes into staggering dimension that seem to speak of a birds eye view that undulates with light and form below us. Thomas’s work makes the viewer feel small in the face of color; it taps into something primal and earthly all the while suggesting the impossibility of scale in a universe that we cannot begin to understand or conquer.