Untitled (Artists at Work), c. 1949

Eve Garrison's untitled painting presents a rural landscape as a collage-like assemblage of sharply angled fractured planes arbitrarily tinted in bright colors. Dominated by the blocky form of a black house or barn, the scene includes vignettes of everyday life in pairs of figures: a man on a ladder above another figure on the ground by a truck or other vehicle; two men in conversation, or argument, at the lower left; a pair of chickens; and two blonde long-haired girls in pink near the building. The most prominent twosome is a man and a woman seated in the foreground. Linked by the strong red and blue of their clothing, both appear to be absorbed in drawing.

Born Eve Josephson in Boston, Garrison attended the Art Institute of Chicago, graduating in 1930, and the Society of Arts and Crafts in Detroit. She also studied engineering in Detroit and went on to work in engine design. Garrison spent much of her long artistic career in Chicago, evolving through a dizzying variety of styles and approaches that eventually included surrealism, expressionist abstraction, "sculptured oils" with heavily worked surfaces incorporating everyday found materials, and dynamic geometric works that anticipated pop art.

During the 1930s and 1940s, while Garrison was employed by the easel division of the WPA's Illinois Art Project, a statewide artists' relief program, she painted straightforwardly naturalistic portraits, Chicago cityscapes, and landscapes of Colorado and Mexico. In 1947, when she studied in the artists' colony at Woodstock, New York, she began to experiment with abstraction inspired by analytical cubism. This painting is one of several dating to the late 1940s, when Garrison began shifting toward the fully developed abstraction that would dominate her painting in the following decade. As if anticipating that, both draftsmen pictured here appear to be working on abstract compositions, oblivious to the prosaic objects and incidents that surround them.