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Sallie Lee Blount Mahood
Blue Ridge Mountains, ca 1930s
Sallie Lee Blount Mahood was the most successful painter in one of Virginia's acclaimed (female) artistic dynasties. While best known for portraits of Lynchburg gentry, her landscape studies reveal a more fluid painting style and creative energy. As a summer student of Kenneth Hayes Miller, a famed instructor at New York's Art Students League, Mahood explored plein-air (outdoor) painting during the 1930s. This fresh, tonal view of the Blue Ridge Mountains, likely produced near her Lynchburg home, suggests her teacher's distinctive matte surfaces and use of a palette knife. It also reveals Mahood's sense of color as abstract structural form, undoubtedly gained from a close study of Paul Cezanne, the so-called father of modern art. |