Alaska 1 1958

Hedda Sterne made this painting titled, Alaska 1, and it looks like she used oils to do it. Right away, I am drawn to the way the muted palette makes the whole thing feel like a memory. There’s a real sense of atmosphere here, where the paint is brushed thinly in layers, almost like a watercolor. Look closely, and you'll see how Sterne lets the paint drip and run in places. She’s not trying to hide the process; she’s embracing it. Those vertical drips, combined with the diagonal thrust of the darker marks, give the painting a sense of movement, like you're moving through the landscape. The texture is smooth, but with subtle variations that catch the light. The darker, almost black, lines cutting across the canvas feel like they’re both defining and disrupting the space. It's like she’s asking us to reconsider how we see and experience the world around us. You can see in the work of Agnes Martin and maybe even some of the early Abstract Expressionists like Rothko that Sterne was in conversation with the great and good. Ultimately, this is a painting that invites multiple readings and resists easy answers.