Mattie in the Morning Glories
Folk and Self-Taught Art

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Mattie in the Morning Glories
Artwork Details
Artist/Maker
Mattie Lou O'Kelley
American, 1908–1997
American, 1908–1997
Date
1992
Medium
Oil on canvas
Accession #
1996.30
Dimensions
Please contact the Museum for more information.
Location
Currently Not on View
Description
Although she is best known for her memory paintings, Mattie Lou O’Kelley often painted subjects from life. This is the eighty-four-year-old artist’s matter-of-fact representation of herself. The composition’s symmetrical, flattened forms and the subject’s rigid pose and solemn expression evoke the work of the limner painters, self-taught portraitists of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America. Assisted by the figure’s geometric simplicity, the trio of astringent green, pink, and yellow disrupts what might otherwise be a cloying scene.
Credit
T. Marshall Hahn CollectionImage Copyright
(c) Mattie Lou O'Kelley Memorial Trust