Gertrude Abercrombie, owls and UFOs

The Courtship

The Courtship by the surrealist painter, Gertrude Abercrombie. It is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. What's interesting is that there is a flying saucer over the man's head and an owl in the lower left. Was this "courtship" a sort of alien abduction? The man is wearing a villain's mask and he is "miming" a gun with his thumb and index finger. The woman is holding up her arms in apparent surrender. The painting was done in 1949, two years after Roswell, when flying saucers were a hot topic. Saucerian-looking, lenticular clouds appear in most of her other works.

I received this image in an email this morning from a reader named John. I immediately started searching out her paintings. Click on any image for a HIrez view.

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Gertrude Abercrombie (February 17, 1909 – July 3, 1977) was an American painter based in Chicago. Called "the queen of the bohemian artists." She was involved in the Chicago jazz scene and was friends with musicians such as Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Sarah Vaughan, whose music inspired her own creative work.

Owl and the Moon

Many compositions feature a lone woman in a flowing gown, often depicted with attributes of sorcery: an owl, a black cat, a crystal ball, or a broomstick. These works were often self-portraits, as she stated in an interview with Studs Terkel shortly before her death: "it is always myself that I paint." Tall and sharp-featured, she considered herself ugly; in life she sometimes wore a pointed velvet hat to accentuate her witch-like appearance, she enjoyed the power this artifice gave her over others who would fear or recoil from her.

(text from Wikipedia)

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  for more examples of her work, click HERE  
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