| Elliot Orr | ||
| Birth Date: June 26, 1904 |
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| Death Date: September 26, 1997 Artist Gallery |
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| Elliott Orr was born in Flushing , New York, June 26, 1904. As a child he spent his summers with his grandmother in Ireland. It is felt that this background provides some of the temperament that can be felt in Orr’s paintings today – imaginative, reflective, an incurable romantic all in the great tradition of the Irish.
Orr, during the depression of the thirties, was one of the artists assisted by the Federal Arts Projects. Cape Cod, where he spent most of his time from the 1930s to the late 70s, influenced his used of color and subject matter. The early paintings are somber and turbulent. Orr shows storms at sea, ships wrecked and adrift amid terrifying waves. During, this 40-year span of time, Orr spent a 6-month period in Mexico and his paintings turned to warm colors and bright skies. But in 1948, he returns to the sea and the shore that touches it for his theme in painting.
In the 1939 “Modern Art in America”, Martha Cheney quoted Orr as saying, “Nature holds for me an emotional or subjective meaning as well as a visual or objective meaning. I always try to unite the two things when I paint. In this way only do I feel that I am fully able to express the reality of my experience.”
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