Windy Night 2016

Rose Freymuth-Frazier built this landscape, ‘Windy Night’ with layers of brushstrokes in muted earth tones, punctuated by streaks of blues and yellows. I imagine the painting coming into being as an act of pure translation, a felt record of observing the landscape, a windy night perhaps? I really feel for this artist, trying to get the atmospheric conditions just right. The paint is laid on thinly, almost stained into the canvas. Look closely, and you'll notice how the horizontal marks across the sky create a sense of movement, a gust of wind pushing the clouds. The sky is so present that the bottom portion of the work almost disappears. It reminds me of other painters like Gerhard Richter, where landscape becomes a vehicle to examine the surface of painting itself. Artists are always in dialogue with one another, reaching across time and space to share insights. Painting, in particular, becomes this embodied expression, a messy, beautiful, and uncertain process.