Gertrude Abercrombie

Abercrombie famously said

“It is always myself that I paint” and, even in her still life paintings and empty rooms she is present. The repertoire of personal objects that recur in her paintings come to stand in for the artist herself. She adopted the owl and the cat, familiars of the witch, for compositions in which she wanted to emphasize those roles.

Gertrude Abercrombie

Although she freely changed the color; she always had a number of cats in her household, and identified with them deeply (when she was expecting her daughter Dinah, she said she could imagine giving birth to a cat, but not a human); and the barren tree with low clouds almost serving a dual function as foliage, as well as the eerie path leading nowhere is a meaningful and repeatedly used setting.

Gertrude Abercrombie

The subject of the painting is based on a phonograph, in its later forms also called a gramophone or since the 1940s called a record player, or more recently a turntable, a device for the mechanical and analogue recording and reproduction of sound; a tool in which Abercrombie was very fond. Music and jazz in particular was a dominant influence in her life.

There are other elements in the painting that are familiar from Abercrombie’s oeuvre as well. The ascetic foreground and background is a meaningful and repeatedly used setting reflecting the artist’s inner emptiness and insecurity, the mysterious orange door on the
device challenges the viewers perception of scale.

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