Oboe

Though Oboe looks like a window, it seems to be hiding something. Two narrow white lines, a couple inches thick, cross in the center and cut the twenty eight inch square canvas into four black squares. Harvey Quaytman painted Oboe with acrylic in nineteen eighty-seven.

The white lines that cross the center are only a couple inches thick. The vertical line appears continuous while the horizontal is slightly paler on either side. Close examination shows the vertical layer was laid over the horizontal. There are also faint gray lines a quarter way from the top and bottom of the vertical stripe where the paint is raised up over a layer in the middle.

There is a thin pinstripe of orange reaching from the center of the bottom left pane to the center of the top left pane. It is interrupted by the white horizontal, as if it were behind the white stripe. On the right side there is another orange pinstripe that reaches all the way from the top edge to the bottom edge, bisecting the right side squares. As on the left, the line is interrupted by the white horizontal.

There are two more orange pinstripes that are right along the top and bottom edge of the painting where they are easy to miss. They go from the middle of the right panel to the middle of the left panel, again broken by the center white vertical stripe. Altogether the orange lines would form a rectangle if the left side extended all the way up and down.

In the black squares there are tiny spatters of blue and orange. Upon close examination, it appears that the black squares were painted blue and orange underneath and then black was applied to almost entirely cover up the color beneath. Each black square seems to be also quartered. On the left half, the sub squares are all blue except the two orange middle squares to the right of the orange line. Above and below the orange line, there is a faint trace of a blue line. On the right half, the sub-squares have blue spatter on the left and orange spatter to the right of the orange line.