Good Morning I is one of a series executed by the artist in 1974 of four paintings (Good Morning I and II and Good Afternoon I and II) that show one or two people in a canoe on Coleman Pond, a lake adjacent to Katz's summer home in Maine. Katz has remarked that the series is concerned with "Water, Light, [and] Time of Day." Seen together, the paintings form a cycle marked by the sense of natural rhythms and elapsed time.
While there is no sky depicted in Good Morning I, the effects of light are everywhere, bouncing off the white of the boys' T shirts and the birchbark of the canoe and creating the apparent reflection of the canoe on the water surface. The pairing of the canoe with its reflection and the absence of a horizon line heighten the tension between the flatness of the painting and the depth and movement of the athletic scene it depicts.
M. B.