Voyaging, 1931

Narrator: By the time she made Voyaging and other works in this show, Pelton’s circumstances were quite modest—and she supported herself financially by painting landscape scenes for tourists. But until the death of an uncle who had supported her, she had lived a life of relative privilege.

Mary Weatherford: Agnes did a lot of traveling. She traveled to Hawaii, Syria, Beirut, all around the Mediterranean.

Narrator: Artist Mary Weatherford.

Mary Weatherford: So I think she was familiar with shipboard. That means she was familiar with looking out at the horizon and seeing it as a curve. And so what she's done is painted in the foreground, a sea foam green stylized version of waves, and then moving outwards, an ultramarine far horizon.

On the right hand side is a bell. Agnes Pelton, in the early part of the century, taught at her mother's music school in Brooklyn. She was interested in the connection between color and sound. This painting is a painting of shipboard sounds. One of the sounds is a bell, which reminds me of a poem by Emily Dickinson that Agnes Pelton was probably familiar with, and the line from that poem that looks like it's in this painting says, "Then space began to toll / As all the heavens were a bell, / And being but an ear. . ."