Agnes Pelton, Sea Change

Carrie Moyer: I have been interested in Agnes Pelton for a really long time. I guess we would consider her a kind of transcendentalist painter from the mid-twentieth century. So it's this woman who's self-inventing the kind of spirituality that she wants to practice, and that becomes part of these paintings. 

Narrator: The painter Carrie Moyer spoke to us about Agnes Pelton’s Sea Change.

Carrie Moyer: Pelton's palette is really phenomenal in terms of it has a kind of like sweetness to it that feels so away or separated from things we think of as being from nature. Right? So everything is this very heightened, saturated color.

We don't know exactly where this is. We know that it's a sort of mental space, and the color tells us that because it doesn't seem to have a direct relationship to observation. It's this heightened sense of. It's almost like we're looking out from a cave or something into this really deep light, maybe dusk or something.

And then there's, one could call it a kind of art deco locomotive, but it's also like a cloud that has this crazy glowing head on it. So it feels like the term "sea change" is much more than talking about nature. Right? It's about a sort of change of morphing or something. I just think it's the most intriguing painting, because it's really hard to figure out where this form is in terms of the landscape. Is it like sitting on the horizon? Is it erupting? Is it gliding? It's doing all of those things.