Selden Connor Gile 1877 - 1947

Mrs. Wallace Hale, Saratoga, California
Brustlin Workshop Inc., San Francisco, California
Private Collection, Belvedere, California
By descent to the present owner

California State Fair Art Exhibition, n.d.

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Bridging the narrative tradition of American and European scene painting of the nineteenth century with a distinctly modern approach, Selden Gile’s bold paintings of the early 20^th defied strict categorization. Mingling an emotional response on canvas with an honest depiction of the natural California landscape that lay in front of him, Gile’s work exemplified the Post-Impressionist tendencies of the Society of Six, of which he was a leading member. While often still executed en plein air, Gile’s best work exhibits a spontaneity and freshness of vision belied by a thoughtfully rendered composition, as exhibited in The Porch of 1937. The present painting is a notably large and expressive example from the artist’s career that clearly demonstrates Gile’s ongoing admiration for the French masters Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard, yet is executed in a style and language markedly his own.

The clear choice by Gile to remove any overt human presence from the scene, beyond the passing sailboats in the distance, lends to the underlying curiosity the artist has for concentrating on the exploration of color and form in his paintings. While the deliberately placed chair and neatly adorned table indicate a passing of time and inhabitants coming and going, The Porch is a much more thoughtful expression of Gile’s immediate impression of his environment, a recognition of the freshness and spontaneity of the painting process that would ultimately define the abstract painters of the next generation. In The Porch, Gile employs a bold use of both vertical and horizontal line in the foreground and trellis to establish tension in the scene, juxtaposing interior and exterior, warm and cool, and ultimately, realism and abstraction and bold blocks of color. This play of form and color would subsequently distinguish a later generation of artists in and around the Bay Area, most notably Richard Diebenkorn and his gestural abstractions of the 1950s, further underscoring Gile’s place as a critical precedent in defining the language of American landscape painting in the mid twentieth century.