Week #1 From Museum Collections I

Hoar Frost in Vienna Woods, 1958, oil on canvas, 37 ½” x 59 ½”. Collection of Ogden Museum of Southern Art.

In light of the deep frieze most of the country is currently experiencing, I thought  we would share this painting with you to start of this frigid new year. It is a beautiful abstract painting, by Dusti Bongé, in the collection of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. It was a gift of the Foundation to the Museum in 2002.  We will share more works from various museum collections over the next several weeks.

The subject matter of this large painting is very à-propos. As the title indicates, Dusti here offers us an abstract interpretation of the phenomenon of hoar frost, which occurs under specific cold conditions. It is a type of frost with a feathery quality that forms on exposed grass, branches, stems and leaves of trees and plants, or on wires and lines. Hoar frost happens when very moist cold air reaches its frost point. The water vapor in the air comes into contact with small diameter exposed solid surfaces that are already below freezing. This results in the water vapor immediately condensing into ice, specifically, very fine icy crystals that almost look like white hair.

This painting is an excellent example of how Dusti would render a particular experiences or observation into a completely abstract composition that nonetheless evokes the essence of said experience. It is what imbues many of the paintings she did in Biloxi their unique sense of place.  With titles hinting at storms, hurricanes, water, and sea, her works give universal expression to very particular phenomena.

In this work the almost monochromatic color palette ranges from whites to grays to delicate traces of black, and is only barely accented with some very pale blues. The brush strokes are an ingenious mix of broad vertical marks broken up by delicate angular hairline traces. All together, these colors and expressive gestures indeed conjure a cold icy quality that is nonetheless of exquisite beauty.