Reaching Waves

In early 1929, Dove and his partner, artist Helen Torr, lived in a waterside cottage near Noroton Point, Connecticut. A seasoned boatman and keen observer of nature, Dove undoubtedly watched the chilly winter tides ebb and flow on the Long Island Sound. He distilled those observations in this nearly monochromatic abstraction, in which irregular waves, some tipped with flecks of white suggestive of foam, rush toward an implied shoreline across a background of vertical bars that evoke the ridges of the ocean floor. By harnessing the emotional power of color and line, Dove expressed his subjective response to nature.