The American Porter The Artist's Wife

Fairfield Porter (1907-1975) was an American painter and art critic who studied socially relevant art and produced realist artwork during the majority of his career. Wanting to depict the “authentically lived experience” in each of his paintings, he painted in a representational style during the height of the Abstract Expressionism’s dominance. He did not find much inspiration to construct pieces stemming from abstract ideology. An example of Porter’s natural yet highly objective style of painting is The Artist’s Wife, an oil-on-canvas portrait painted in 1954. By placing the subject of the painting in the center and using various brush strokes and a muted color palette, Porter created the The Artist’s Wife to have an overall somber mood, which can help give viewers insight to the mental and emotional state of the subject of the painting.
The painting is extremely simplistic in terms of the composition and elements that constitute it. The main subject of the canvas is an older woman who is sitting on a chair inside a house. Behind
By looking at the painting from a health humanities perspective, viewers are able to see how her body posture, facial expression, and her relationship with her surroundings can help give clues signaling that the older woman is unhappy or struggling with something. This painting could also be related to the topic of aging and falling. Her apprehension and constriction to the chair can be explained by a traumatic fall in her past, which could have resulted in a fear of falling or hurting herself. If she was once a vibrant and energetic woman, then the fall could have been the end of her freedom. Without her independence, she may have suffered through a loss of her identify and hence does not know what to do with herself other than to sit and be cautious. This can explain the gloomy and depressed mood portrayed in the