Truitt believed that the experience of being nearsighted as a child, and thus seeing people as blobs of color, greatly influenced her art. Her sculptures were often an effort to understand her past—as she once remarked, the result of “trying to objectify my life.” Catawba, for example, was the street in Asheville, North Carolina, where she recovered from appendicitis surgery. Color was essential to Truitt: she believed it permeates the form rather than lying on the surface. In Catawba, she emphasized this idea by applying nearly twenty coats of paint to the wood.
Gallery label from "Collection:1940s—1970s", 2019