The Heckscher Museum of Art’s collection spans 500 years with particular emphasis on art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. American landscape painting and work by Long Island artists, past and present, are particular strengths, as is American and European modernism.
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Minding Dog Rag
If one steps back from a George D. Green work—far enough to take in the entire canvas—one perceives three-dimensional projections. The seemingly flat paint on the canvas forms discrete spatial levels with depth and mass. Such is the goal of Green, a trompe l’oeil artist who aims to “trick the eye” with his abstract canvases. As related by Green, the irregular shape of his works, such as Minding Dog Rag (the title, an allusion to his dog and taste in music) occurred by chance when “a large gob of heavy impasto was flung off a fast moving spatula and landed on the border of the canvas . . . extend[ing] beyond the geometric boundaries of the stretched canvas.” Eventually, the paint hurled by Green’s gestural movements could no longer be supported by the edge of the canvas, so he added a wooden framework to the original stretcher, resulting in shaped works recalling those of Frank Stella from the 1960s. In addition to creating the appearance of three-dimensional space, these forms add movement to Green’s canvases, following the advice of his grandfather to “draw big and put some action into it.”