A Stillness by the Pool

One of Bob Kuhn’s most celebrated paintings, A Stillness by the Pool is a masterwork of the artist’s wildlife imagery. With impeccable details, bold colors and impressive scale, Kuhn captures the fleeting moment just after a tiger has successfully captured its prey. Tired from the quest, the proud animal hovers over the fallen victim in a somber yet sensitive manner. Using an abstract, deep crimson background, Kuhn highlights the hunter and the hunted as the focal point of the composition.

For Kuhn, color was a pivotal factor when creating A Stillness by the Pool. The artist explained of the present work: "Among the silly taboos regarding color that I've heard over the years, one is 'don’t mix orange and red.’ The logical response would be: which orange and which red? One of the reasons I took on this project was that I wanted to place the orange tiger and his recently vanquished prey (a female guar) against a rich, dark-red background. I liked what happened, and so it stands today. It is one of the innumerable examples of a painter experimenting with new color and spatial relationships, deciding that the results are worth preserving, and then being credited with having profound theories regarding design and color." (as quoted in T. Davis, Wild Harvest: The Animal Art of Bob Kuhn, Columbia, South Carolina, 1997, p. 92)