Arthur Dove moon drawings, from Helen Torr Dove & Arthur Dove’s diary, 1936, image: aaa.si.edu
In 1936 Arthur Dove and his wife Helen “Reds” Torr were living upstate, in Geneva. That fall Reds went to Hartford to take care of her injured mother, and was gone for what turned out to be more than two months. Alone and pining for his wife, Dove eventually began making sketches of the moon each night in the diary they kept together.
From Jennifer Stettler Parsons’ 2012 essay on Dove and the moon:
In addition to recording the temperature and weather conditions, Dove began making drawings in his diary (1936 diary, p. 137). These sketches, with their shadings and mysterious markings, appear to be evidence of the artist tracking the moon. The moon drawings continue each day with notations of temperature and barometric pressure, until Reds returned home on 8 November 1936.13 (1936 diary, p.155, 160). They mysteriously cease for two days on 15 and 16 November, but recommence on 17 November. (1936 diary, p.164-165) Dove continues to draw the moon every day until the end of the year. The new 1937 diary contains no moon drawings.(1937 diary, p.2) The drawings do not directly correspond to any established system of astronomical recording. The lunar notations, with their symbolic shadows and arrows (which change and move in each drawing), might be said to represent an individual system that Dove invented to document his observations in a personal and meaningful way.
Dove and Torr’s papers are at the AAA, which has digitized their diary.
Absence and Presence: Arthur Dove’s Paintings “From the Radio” by Jennifer Parsons [aaa.si.edu]
Helen Torr Dove and Arthur Dove diary, 1936 [aaa.si.edu]