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Summer Image (For My Mother)

Summer Image (For My Mother) was painted in nineteen eighty-three by Jay DeFeo. Roughly five and a half feet tall by three and a half feet wide, the oil and acrylic are applied as bold brush strokes that don’t hide the medium. Though it is abstract, the image hints at representation. At a glance, the almost monochrome painting looks like it could be a three-dimensional shape or evocative of figures but when you look at the details, it evades deciphering. The overall shape is a frenetic number seven with a bold horizontal line extending right just below the bottom. The background is mostly an inconsistent dark gray except the bottom right is white with sparse paint splatters.

A thin steep diagonal black line extends from the bottom left up and ends several inches short of the top right corner. Brush strokes extend left from the line. At the bottom, there are medium gray strokes a couple inches wide that cross over one another. Halfway up the diagonal line, there is a dark orange area that is surrounded by more gray brushstrokes that have been painted over it, some dark orange has also splashed below the diagonal line. Left of the top of the diagonal line, there are small dense splatters of dark orange, cool purple, blue-gray and black. Across the top of this section, emerging from the color splatter beneath it is a wide black to blue-gray gradient arc, like the curved back of a whale.

Nestled inside the seven is a white shape, loosely resembling a lightning bolt. The middle angles towards the seven then down, following the stem and disappears into the gray brush strokes. The top has a clean outline that rounds toward the seven.

The bottom right of the composition is all white except for some sparse vertical paint drips. To the right on the thin diagonal line, around the aforementioned dark orange splatter, a thick black horizontal line with sharp edges extends to the right side of the painting. This thick line forms the base of a triangle, along with the thin diagonal line on the left and on the right, some chalky brushstrokes roughly blending dark gray and white. Within the triangle, some wispy rusty black brush strokes reach horizontally toward the center.