American Art Collaborative

The houses in this dense townscape, a depiction of Langlais’s childhood home of French Island in Old Town, Maine, appear almost to interlock, their opaque white faces contrasting with the prismatic colors of the trees. Langlais liberally layered pigments on the rooftops and in the small voids between houses, turning an elevated view of the town into a mesmerizing, quiltlike composition. He also reworked the painting at some point, adding the scumbled black lines (and giving it the more generic title of The Town). These graphic marks superimpose an abstract grid on the architecture, challenging its spatial illusionism.