Shaker Visionary Image 1935 - 1942

This Shaker Visionary Image was made by Orville Cline, who was born in 1855 and died in 1995. This is a drawing which seems to have been worked and reworked, with layers of soft coloured pencil and graphite, creating a dreamlike composition. Cline divides his picture plane into horizontal registers with borders that contain smaller vignettes; a room, a tree, a bird in flight. Each of these frames is a portal. The colour is muted, almost faded; these blues and reddish browns may have been brighter when they were first applied. There’s a particular clock at the top of the image that I keep going back to. It’s a drawing within a drawing that tells its own time. Maybe Shaker art is Cline's own personal language, like the work of Hilma af Klint, or Forrest Bess; it gives us a glimpse into the cosmos, with both feet firmly on the ground.