Probing the peculiar

“Tree, table, and Cat” (oil on canvas), by Gertrude Abercrombie, in the show “Gertrude Abercrombie: The Whole World Is a Mystery,’’ at the Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine, through Jan. 11.

— Photo by Michael Tropea

The museum explains:

“Gertrude Abercrombie (1909–1977) produced hundreds of paintings imbued with autobiography that revealed her emotional truth and declared it as real. A critical figure in the mid-20th-Century Chicago art and jazz scenes, Abercrombie made art to give her internal life visual form. She put herself into her painted world—in self-portraits, landscapes, interior scenes, and still lifes—through the use of personal symbols and enigmatic female figures. She probed her consciousness, mined her memories, drew on her dreams, and found the peculiar in everyday life, painting, as she said, ‘simple things that are a little strange.”’

‘‘Abercrombie lived in defiance of her era’s social norms. By blending layers of reality, her paintings similarly question existence as commonly understood and posit alternate dimensions. Though she had a singular vision, her reliance on her inner consciousness and use of a fantastical style connected her to broader developments in American modernism.’’