Beyond
fashion: American landscape at BlackRock
by Claudia Rousseau
Dec. 18, 2003
The BlackRock Center for the Arts in Germantown is showing
a group of landscape oils by three Maryland resident artists: Lisa Egeli,
Richard Ray and Raymond Burns. These paintings confront the viewer with
the historic resiliency of traditional landscape art in American painting.
The exhibition also provokes significant questions about the trajectory
of American art in the 20th century, and about the place of landscape
painting in the current art scene.
… Of the three artists exhibiting, the work of Lisa Egeli is most
obviously connected to earlier American landscape traditions. Egeli is
clearly the best trained and most capable of pulling us into the scene.
Her work reflects classic landscape composition, with weighted dark areas
near the edges balancing lighter colored ones, and a pictorial structure
of interlocking forms moving up the picture plane. Her technique is surprisingly
painterly. From a distance of about three feet, it appears tight and smooth,
but closer inspection reveals a more spontaneous touch.
Her very large painting, "The Way It Is," strikes the viewer
upon entering the gallery with its rich blue tonality. Blue water turns
into blue atmosphere above, devoid of human interference. The title is
evocative of the questions it poses concerning environmental issues. Egeli's
handling of light here is Luminist in effect, as it is in another striking
work, "Slow Thaw," as well as in "Dimming of the Day."
All three paintings are in oil on linen, a smoother surface than canvas.
The special light effect in "Slow Thaw" reminded me of some
paintings I recently saw in the Frederick Remington retrospective at the
National Gallery, paintings that fairly oozed with nostalgia even when
new…
Review
— Gazette News, by Claudia Rousseau
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