Edna Andrade, Cliff and Pebbles

Andrade is best known for her geometric abstraction, but she began her career as a realist painter. In the 1940s and 1950s, she made precisely detailed paintings, often of the rocky coast of Maine. She returned to this subject matter and style in the mid-1990s. Here, she shows off her ability to sculpt forms in line and create atmosphere with evocative light and shadow. Ann McPhail, who donated this print to the Museum, recounts her and her husband’s experience while visiting Andrade in Maine:

The drawings from the Cranberry Islands are among my very favorite works in the collection. On one hand they are in fact abstractions, and on the other hand you recognize the landscape and know where you are if you’re familiar with the area around Bar Harbor, the islands, and the views out and so forth. Don and I knew Edna well. We once went over to visit her on an island off Bar Harbor, and she drove us around to show us some of the rocky places she loved to draw. Her wonderful old car didn’t have a floor. It was an old Datsun. Edna was like a character in a movie. She had a big hat on and she was driving us around the island. You’d look down and you could see the road whipping by!