Resting

We see the subject of Resting up close, as though sitting across from him on the ground engaged in casual conversation. The title, coupled with the man’s bare feet and everyday clothes, suggests that he is taking a momentary rest from work on the farm. Although his eyes are hidden by a red hat, his face is attentive as he regards the unseen viewer. The palette of ochers, blues, reds, and greens and the loosely brushed shapes of his body and the the landscape behind him are liberally laid down with a palette knife. They echo the expressionist canvases of Vincent van Gogh that Clark studied in the late 1930s and early 1940s at the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania. Although Clark was born in Georgia, where his father worked as a tenant farmer, his family was part of the great migration of African Americans who moved from rural Southern towns to the urban North in the 1920s.