Light Blue Nursery

The chromatic impact of Light Blue Nursery is dramatic. Small blocks of irregularly configured primary colors dance across a bright white surface in horizontal rows that echo the ordered energy of a formal garden. Secondary and tertiary hues – pinks, purples, and greens – serve as borders and accents, reflecting Thomas’s conviction that she could play with perception and optical interaction in images drawn from her visual experience of the natural world. Although seemingly constructed of spontaneous strokes of the brush, the forms, like the colors, are thoughtfully calibrated.

African American Art: Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights Era, and Beyond, 2012

With its neatly ordered rows of brushstrokes, Light Blue Nursery evokes the appearance of colorful plants lined up at a nursery. The variation of touch and direction with which Thomas applied the strokes of paint creates a sense of flickering movement. She once said, “My paintings of nurseries and flower gardens have been inspired by the forms or color patterns seen from airplanes speeding through space.”

Acquired in 1970, Light Blue Nursery was the first painting by Thomas to enter the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. It was a favorite of the museum’s director at the time, Joshua Taylor, who hung it in his office. It also spent time on loan to the White House. Stephen Hess, the National Chairman of the White House Conference on Children and Youth, later wrote in a letter to the artist, “[it] cheered me up during many dark moments.”

During the 1960s, African American painter Alma Thomas emerged as an exuberant colorist and member of the Washington Color Field School, abstracting shapes and patterns from the trees and flowers around her and creating works that shimmer with color. “Color is life," Thomas once explained. "Light reveals to us the spirit and living soul of the world through colors.” She produced some of her most important works in this decade, including Light Blue Nursery. The rhythmic horizontal lines of bright blues, reds, yellows, and greens are offset by white areas of untouched raw canvas, creating a jewel-like mosaic.

". . . through my impressions of nature . . . I hoped to impart beauty, joy, love, and peace." The artist, quoted in Van Vechten, Recent Painting by Alma W. Thomas: Earth and Space Series, Exhibition Catalogue, Gallery of Fine Arts, 1971