Autumn Expansion

Yvonne Jacquette is best known for her skillful use of aerial viewpoints, a compositional technique that allowed her to present familiar landscapes and cityscapes from new and unexpected perspectives.  Peering out from rooftops, skyscrapers, and even airplane windows, she sketched and photographed the scenes below, often in preparation for larger paintings or prints made back in her studio.

Jacquette created Autumn Expansion for the original lobby of the Margaret Chase Smith Federal Building.  The three-part mural depicts overlapping views of a wooded area in nearby Searsmont, which Jacquette captured in a series of pastel sketches that she composed while circling overhead in a small airplane.  “I flew from Belfast at noon every day in mid-September [1980] for five days to get the same light,” she said.

For the final paintings, Jacquette employed her characteristic brushwork of dots and dashes to render the beauty of Maine’s fall foliage as a dazzling patchwork of brilliant color.  The various shapes, sizes, and concentrations of her brushstrokes differentiate the trees, meadows, and paved roadways.  Autumn Expansion also conveys a subtle sense of movement through time and space, thanks to its shifting viewpoints and repeating details, like the little red truck that turns from one road to the next in the mural’s central and right panels.