For over 40 years Truman Egleston has explored in his paintings the interplay of color and geometry. He uses both to create elemental luminist abstractions. In this age of digital graphics, their precision is the more remarkable for being executed entirely by hand and eye.

Egleston's paintings experiment with resonances between shape and hue, each enhancing the other with their vivid presence. The paintings often feel like windows onto vastly larger spaces. These spaces in turn are broken either simply, by columns or diagonals, or complexly, fractured by a dense and colorful turbulence. To the left we present thumbnails of recent work by the artist, the Keystone series, as well as selected examples from earlier series.The thumbnail images are each a link to a larger version of the work.

Two of Egleston's principal innovations to create his distinct sense of space and color are what he calls the "edge kill" and the "echo band". In his words, "the edge kill is a line that separates areas of color and allows me to control equivocal space. The echo band is a line of color floating in space, that echoes an already existing color."

Prior to the Keystone series, Egleston's abstractions most often consisted of contrasting spaces separated by sharp edged geometries, with internally smooth gradients in light and color. In this most recent series he has introduced richly structured regions bounded by straight edged perimeters. This adds a third element to his development of spatial contrast: together with the character of their color and light, Egleston finds a balance between the degree of fine detail and depth of irregular structure within contrasting spaces.

In this way the changes in Egleston's own work over time parallel historical changes in the geometric vocabulary of mathematics. For from its roots in the ideal and simple forms of the ancient Greeks, the language of mathematics is now rich with complex topologies and infinitely fragmented shapes, and these have become the physicist's most current tools to attempt to understand the intricate dynamics of all things, from the smallest to the largest elements of the universe.

-- Frank Peseckis, July 1998

Artist's Statement

I was born in the New England city of Westfield, Massachusetts in 1931. At that time Westfield was a vital industrial city with stores, hotels, paper mills, factories, trolleys and trains.

At the age of twelve I began working on the produce farms and in the tobacco fields. I knew the farmers but related more with the trades people. They had a sense of integrity to their work as high craft. They showed their sense of order and rightness in the abstract form of their product. The blacksmiths and electricians signed their work. My father and uncles were all double or triple tradesmen - mechanics, electricians, plumbers. I was not gifted in those areas, but I did believe in their philosophy - a strong, traditional integrity of quality work.

After the army years of the early fifties and college years of the late fifties, I decided to abandon all reference to natural form in my work and to investigate color in a pure sense. I placed different colors side by side on a canvas in vertical forms, creating an intuitive spatial rhythm.

At this same time I wanted to discourage all reference to European art as having an inspirational value to my work. I became an aesthetic maverick committed to formal abstraction. My philosophical criteria can be traced back to the Greeks and to the geometric simplicity, beauty, and power of Egyptian pyramids.

My interest in equivocal spatial activity has been a concern and a constant in my painting for many years. My current "abstractness" is based upon my own inner life history of theme and variational conclusions, done over the past thirty years in relative isolation. I am interested in creating a harmony between my philosophy of life and what is a "precise abstraction of timeless perfection".

-- Truman Egleston, April 1994