Sylvia Plimack Mangold adhered to illusion and representation when she started painting in the 1960s, a period when minimalist aesthetics disdained imagery. The artist first began rendering carefully observed measuring instruments and floors covered with light in her earlier paintings, including Half Window (1993.67) also in the Museum's collection. Eventually, Plimack Mangold began to focus on the landscape in the tradition of Thomas Cole and Frederick Church, who both resided and painted a century earlier in the Hudson Valley where she too observed the natural world. After a critically successful series of night landscapes she embarked on an increasingly abstract form of painting in the guise of luscious and colorful sunsets, as found in Vermillion Glow. Dominating the composition is the artist's loose and expressive application of paint, while the landscape has become a minor but critical element. Never far from her minimalist roots, Plimack Mangold draws the viewer back to the reality that this is an illusion, created through paint, as revealed by the highly accurate trompe l'oeil image of tape framing her composition.

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