Still Life with Poinsettias

Hood’s still life is a love letter to color and texture. Her setup consists of a potted poinsettia, a large bristly pinecone, a dinner bell, and a bowl of fruit with sheets of deep blue tissue paper—a memento of her mentor, Arthur B. Carles, who often used florist’s paper in the still life arrangements he made for his classes. The various objects in Hood’s composition converge into abstract spaces of brilliant rainbow colors. 

Hood enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts but left to marry and raise four children. She later returned briefly before studying privately with Arthur B. Carles and Henry McCarter. In 1941, the Hood family acquired Springdale, an eight-acre farm near New Hope, Pennsylvania, where the artist worked daily in her studio, often painting flowers from her gardens and the surrounding landscape. Hood exhibited with her daughter, Agnes Hood Miller, at the Philadelphia Art Alliance in 1941 and, posthumously, at Woodmere in 2011. 

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