Fairfield Porter paints a marina scene with boats in a dry dock. The original watercolor is as abstract as it is representational, which gives a spark of life to a common scene. Signed on verso. Estate stamp on verso. Matted but not framed, deckled edges

Fairfield Porter was at the forefront of post-war representational painters who struggled for recognition during the heyday of Abstract Expressionism. Although a realist in subject matter, Porter not only admired and championed the abstract work of his friend Willem de Kooning but also himself gravitated to the inherent abstraction found in
nature. He explored the subjective experience of landscape, figurative,
and still life subjects in Southampton and Spruce Head Island, Maine.
His flattened, unmodeled, soft-edged forms portrayed three-dimensional
space with a gestural, lush brush stroke and patterned surface
arrangement of forms. Porter drew inspiration from his domestic life,
once noting to a student: “I think…that a strong religious feeling
requires a strong sense of matter-of-fact.”