David Shevlino
The summer light on the East coast has a clarity and mood all its own. Not sensuous like the light of the tropics but rather dreamlike and introspective... a sense of suspension within a fleeting moment. Similarly, the people in David Shevlino's paintings seem lost in an intimate moment of being that is hauntingly Hopperesque. The raking northeastern light reinforces their solitude in a place where warmth and coolness are balanced and everything is momentarily paused. This same balance of extremes permits a crisp pictorial structure and provides an arena for the artist’s painterly approach to the abstract and formalist side of the work. As the artist explains, “These are realist paintings, but abstract in design, and I tend to be very painterly in paint application. The surface is very animated and there is a lot of stuff going in the paint, like drips and such. The paint is very loose and heavily applied to very thin washes.”

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Cornelia Foss
Where in Shevlino’s work intimacy triggers our response to nature, in the work of Cornelia Foss the opposite holds sway. An expansive generalization of the landscape sweeps our awareness to great distance. A sense of the curvature of the world becomes apparent and in this enormity of space, humans, houses, trees and all details seem to recede to insignificance, their presence overwhelmed by a nearly cosmic sense of space. In her landscapes Foss is really a painter of Air, and above all, space. The sensuous paint application and calligraphy of her brushwork reinforce the depth and distance in her subjects and the simplified foregrounds of her landscapes lead our eyes to remarkable depths where a tiny stroke of vibrant blue informs us that we have reached the infinite expanse of the sea. There is also an intimate side to Foss’s work to be found in her portraits, figure paintings, and floral garden studies. In these we leave the cosmic space of the beach and are brought back to the more familiar scale of everyday life. Her simplicity has nothing to do with facility, but is rather the hard won acumen of an eye and a hand that have purged the dross from her experience and arrived at clarity.

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