Cicada

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Ellen Lanyon’s work has strong affinities with her contemporaries in Chicago, where she was raised, studied and achieved early recognition. Along with Seymour Rosofsky, Lanyon engaged with figurative painting and narration in the 1950s and was familiar with Chicago’s outstanding collections of Surrealist art. Lanyon had an abiding interest in magic and illusion, a quality manifested in 'Cicada', with its precise renderings of the insects and house in an unlikely juxtaposition. The cicadas may reference Lanyon’s interest in nature and the health of our ecosystems following time she spent in the early 1970s working on a commission in the Everglades.

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