For this painting, Ellsworth Kelly used two curved shapes on two panels painted black.
Guess what, believe it or not, those curvy white shapes came from shadows! While Ellsworth Kelly was riding a bus one day, he noticed the shadows that fell across the pages of his book. He turned over the book and quickly made some drawings. Two years later he made this painting.
Instead of making the shadows black and the pages white, Kelly did the opposite. Find the place where the two white shadow shapes meet. If you look closely, you’ll see that this is where the panels meet as well, like the two pages in an open book.
Kelly called this painting Atlantic because those shapes reminded him of waves in the ocean. Take a moment to think about what this painting reminds you of. If you could choose a different title or name for this work, what would you call it?
