John Colt 

Flamboyant 

Oil on canvas 

1990.01  

John Colt (1925-1998) grew up surrounded by art, with his father, Arthur Colt, owning Colt’s School of Painting in Madison, Wisconsin and running several summer art schools throughout Wisconsin. After a stint in the Navy during WWII, Colt got his bachelor and master of arts degrees from UW-Madison and eventually became a UWM professor of art from 1957-1990. It looks like this painting is dated to 1960 but has an accession number that refers to 1990—perhaps this means the painting was donated as a gift to the collection when Colt retired. You can find more about him and view his other work on his MOWA artist page: https://wisconsinart.org/archives/artist/john-n-colt/profile-817.aspx 

Colt himself expressed an interest in depicting “little realms of experience,” and I think this painting is a beautiful and enigmatic example of that. I find this piece to be endlessly fascinating to look at. Take a moment now to just let your eyes wander around the canvas. What do you see? Do you see figures or just shapes? Do you see an exciting action sequence or some strange, surrealist landscape with no rhyme or reason? What connotations do you associate with the multiple colors used, or with the word ‘realm’?

Visual Description: A predominately black canvas with swirls of red evoking billows and plumes of flame across the middle and top left part. A large green geometric shape sits on the right side and white and pink swirls whip up at the bottom of the piece. Abstract and colorful, it contains no clear forms but many implied ones.