Macatawa Bay 

Dorothy Meredith

Macatawa Bay

Watercolor on paper

1962.6.1

This is a watercolor painting of Macatawa Bay, MI, created in 1957 and donated to the collection by the artist in 1962. It features very stylistic and geometrically angular representations  of colorful sailboats in a harbor. At the time it was made, Abstract Expressionists like Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Franz Kline, and Mark Rothko were working with abstraction and colors in two more or less distinct ways. Action painting, which de Kooning and Kline worked in, focused on the painting process whereas Color Field painting, which Frankenthaler and Rothko worked in, focused on the emotive expressions of color and form. In this painting Meredith seems to be taking some inspiration from them with her use of abstract forms and color application, although she is also attempting to expressively depict a specific scene of boats in a bay. Whatever her influences, I love the clever way she has given the impressions of sail boats with minimal brush strokes. How many sailboats can you count in the painting? 

Dorothy Meredith (1906-1986) was a professor emeritus at UWM and was also a founding member of the Wisconsin Watercolor Society. You can learn more about her storied career at the following link: 

http://www.wisconsinart.org/archives/artist/dorothy-laverne-meredith/profile-2325.aspx 

Visual Description: A rainbow assortment of lines create sharp angles, suggesting sails, rays of light and sky, and the hulls of the boats.