Untitled

Organic, soft-edged fields of color overlap to form an amorphous image. Felrath Hines’s brushwork and color palette produce an atmospheric effect, resulting in shapes that appear to float off the canvas. Despite this illusion, the composition remains visually anchored by white in the canvas's four corners, as well as its darker center composed of black, purple, and red.

With its layered arrangement of richly colored forms, this early work by Hines differs greatly from his later works (such as Lorraine, also on view in this gallery), which feature harder-edged abstract forms. Three years after the creation of this work, Hines joined the historic Spiral Group, a New York-based collective of African American artists founded by Romare Bearden.