Best known as a sculptor associated with the minimalist movement of the 1960s and '70s,  Foreign Shore (1979) illustrates a dimensionality to Anne Truitt's oeuvre that remains under-discussed and under-appreciated, as her paintings were rarely exhibited during her lifetime. The technical and formal considerations visible in  Foreign Shore  offer a complement to her sculptures, to be sure. In her three-dimensional practice, once the wooden structure had been completed, Truitt would layer upwards of 30 or 40 coats of paint onto its surface. She would alternate between vertical and horizontal strokes for each layer, sanding each one before applying the next to remove any trace of her hand. In her painting practice, Truitt similarly built up the color slowly through multiple layers of paint through a masking technique she first developed in the 1960s. 

These subtle modulations of color augmented by geometric forms call to mind the work of Ad Reinhardt, whose paintings Truitt first encountered on a 1961 trip to the Guggenheim with a friend to see "American Abstract Expressionists and Imagists." This crossing of paths would be the turning point in Truitt's artistic practice, propelling her towards her now-signature style. Of the experience, she has said she "saw Ad Reinhardt's black canvases, the blacks and the blues. Then I went on down the ramp and rounded the corner and…saw the paintings of Barnett Newman. I looked at them, and from that point on I was home free. I had never realized you could do it in art. Have enough space. Enough color." Foreign Shore not only echoes those blacks and blues in a literal sense but captures a similar metaphysical experience that rewards the act of continued looking. 

This emphasis on color is one of many elements that distinguish her from the minimalist counterparts she is often associated with. The limited range of color oft seen in minimalist works is challenged by Truitt's wide-ranging palette, whose purpose was to imbue memory and feeling into her work. Evoking the emotional rather than stimulating the cerebral places her more along the lines of Abstract Expressionist precursors like that of Reinhardt and Newman instead of situating her within the milieu of artists such as Donald Judd and Carl Andre. Likewise, while many of these artists outsourced the entire process of creating their pieces to fabricators, Truitt placed a premium on making her work herself. She only enlisted the help of a fabricator to create the wooden structures of her sculptures, otherwise completing these and her paintings entirely by hand without the use of studio assistants. 

Painted a few short years after receiving solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (1974) and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in her adopted hometown of Washington D.C (1975), Foreign Shore illustrates what Truitt refers to as “the sharp delight of watching what has been inside one’s own most intimate self materialize into visibility.”