“There’s an end-of-day feeling with the setting amber sun creating long shadows and highlighting the dust kicked-up by the horses.”
The Scottsdale Art Auction in April 2020 features a series of beautiful Clark Hulings paintings that represent a number of eras, places, and styles from his body of work.
Spinning City
This week, we travel to central Anatolia, Turkey. An ancient part of the world that has been settled since 3000 BC, the city of Konya has a population of over two million and is now a thriving hub for automotive parts manufacturing. It is perhaps best-known as the home of the whirling dervish orders and the resting place of the Sufi poet, Rumi.
Magic Hour
Hulings’ Konya Carriage is a 20 x 24″ oil painted in the early 1960s—likely from source material gathered in a 1959 trip. There are rare cases where Hulings recreated a previous watercolor work in oil for Grand Central Galleries, and that’s likely the situation here. A more classic take on transportation in Konya, the subject matter of horse and carriage, along with the drivers’ draped jacket and angled cap, give a timeless feel to the work—although the power lines and the cluster of street lamps in the background distinctly show bulbs, so we do know it’s post-electricity. There’s an end-of-day feeling with the setting amber sun creating long shadows and highlighting the dust kicked-up by the horses. The light streaming all the way through the windows on the building just to the right of the carriage is a gorgeous detail, showing the whole city filled with sunlight and contrasting the mysterious darkened doorway on the left.
Signature Features
Our Hulings fans will see a few characteristic elements in this work: the eye-catching red accent placed on the bridle of the white horse; and an interesting area in the lower right near the Hulings signature, where a band of shadow with a few highlights is expressed in a more abstract way, with visible brushstrokes and the textured use of an almost mint-green.
Meeting Place
Turkey has long been considered to be the meeting of East and West, with the end of the famed Orient Express in nearby Istanbul—this work may remind you of travels in Europe or Asia. If you’d like a personal introduction to our colleagues at Scottsdale Art Auction for more information about how to add Konya Carriage to your collection, please send us a note and we’ll put you in touch!
