Fairfield Porter (1907-1975)

In many of his late landscapes, Fairfield Porter moved further toward an abstract aesthetic, reducing and simplifying forms so that what remained was a pure representation of his surroundings. In Sun Rising Out of the Mist, the understated palette of purple, blue, grey and white, perhaps best reflects this abstraction of his environment, and his interest in exploring the line “between a reaction to natural light and a search for invented color.” (K. Moffett, “The Art of Fairfield Porter,” in Fairfield Porter: Realist Painter in an Age of Abstraction, exhibition catalogue, Boston, 1982, p. 38)

Despite Porter’s move toward minimalism in the present work, the definitive qualities of his overall style remain. Porter’s handling of light, for example, seen most visibly in his rendering of the sun, demonstrates his mastery of technique, with the misty rays of the flat, white circle emanating out toward the crashing waves below. Porter’s prominent representation of the sun was a common motif of the artist’s late paintings. Works like Yellow Sunrise (Private collection, 1974), and the watercolor Large Calm Sunset (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California, circa 1975) contain bold, radiating suns, a subject that Porter was not alone in depicting. Other American Modernists, including Arthur Dove and Georgia O’Keeffe, also represented the sun in important series of works, and Porter was likely influenced by their interpretations of this fundamental form of nature.