Interior with Leland 1946

Louisa Matthiasdottir painted this picture of Leland with confident blocks of colour and deceptively simple shapes. What I mean is, this looks like it just plopped onto the canvas, but everything is carefully calibrated. Look at the way she used such thick paint. You can tell she really loaded up her brush to make those strokes, especially in the way the red stack looms out at us. Those reds and blues aren't just colors; they're stand-ins for feelings, for the sheer stuff of being in a room with someone. The planes overlap and create the illusion of space, but it’s not really about depth, is it? It’s more like the feeling of a space. Matthiasdottir reminds me of Fairfield Porter, another painter who found the extraordinary in ordinary domestic scenes. But unlike Porter's almost photographic realism, Matthiasdottir offers us a world where color and form dance freely. It’s more about how we see than what we see.