Landscape I

Lois Gold’s Landscape I is a beautifully dynamic exercise in abstraction with a figurative bent, told in rich yet delicate washes of acrylic. The diffusion of pigment in the painting's upper half indicates the inherently abstract transition from ground to sky and the marriage of clouds, sunlight, and reflections that make up the blue yonder. The thick impasto bursting forth from the canvas’s lower half is indicative of the earth’s layered topographical surface. All of this is to say that the figurative landscape is described entirely through abstract means. There is nothing overtly figurative about the present work, yet the painterly gestures that comprise the work recall the physical world without indulging in any figurative mark-making. Landscape I is something of a marriage between Joan Mitchell’s landscape paintings and the enigmatic stained canvases of Helen Frankenthaler.