Laurence Typing

In 1949, Fairfield Porter relocated from New York City to Southampton on Long Island, with his wife, the distinguished poet Anne Channing Porter, and their children. During summers in Maine, Porter painted out-of-doors, but in Southampton, the outside world depicted is often the one glimpsed from the interior of his studio. A stone's throw from the back door of his house on South Main Street, the studio was in an old stable, up a narrow flight of stairs to a hayloft that had been refitted with a skylight and north-facing window. Through the window and the opened hayloft doors, Porter enjoyed a panoptic view of his surroundings. For some twenty-five years, this was the primary site of his painting.
Porter saw greater similarities than differences between his work and that of more abstract painters. In an unpublished essay from the early 1960s on Abstract Expressionism and landscape, he commented: "Nowadays most direct expression of experience in painting takes the form of non-objectivity" these artists directly express the paint before them, their creativity and their environment, together. Some of the most direct landscape painting is non-objective. This can be said differently: some of the painting in which the experience of the environment is least translated from the total impact of nature, into paint, is non-objective."