Larry Day and Paul Keene began a life-long friendship at Philadelphia’s Tyler School of Art in the late 1940s after both served in WWII. Both worked in a style of painterly abstraction through the 1950s and Day made frequent trips to New York’s Cedar Tavern friends who included, Franz Kline, Phillip Guston, John Ferren, and Mercedes Matter. He exhibited at Philadelphia’s Dubin Gallery and had several solo exhibitions at New York’s Parma Gallery in the 1950s.

We’ve selected two abstracted landscapes as both show Day searching for a way to express what he feels about what he’s observed. Out of that process, he’s created complex and intelligent metaphors for landscape. We’ve dated Landscape 1954 as such, as it bears a close relationship to a work on canvas.