ELIZABETH OSBORNE
LIQUID LANDSCAPES
June 1 - 30
"If anything unites the disparate arcs of her 50-year career, it's this: that Osborne's paintings don't simply inhabit the spaces between abstraction and representation so much as they gently, subtly and subversively blur them." - Jonathan L. Fischer
Osborne’s work has been described as "living landscapes that integrate complex methods of seeing and representing nature." Utilizing a technique of controlled pours of thinned on unprimed canvas to create a staining technique became a vital breakthrough for the artist in the 1970s. Aware of a similar technique pioneered by painters such as Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis, Osborne was initially interested in capturing the light and transparency of her watercolors and translating those qualities to the canvas. Indeed, Osborne was inspired when she first saw Frankenthaler's legendary Mountain and Sea, 1952, the first of Frankthaler's to use the new celebrated soak-stain technique, and while certainly an abstraction, an abstraction that evokes a landscape. Artist Morris Louis declared that Frankenthaler 'was a bridge between Pollock and what was possible.'
This exhibition spans forty years of her landscapes, with references to mountains, islands, nature forms. These works demonstrate her lifelong devotion to the medium of watercolor. Osborne has frequently painted outdoors and most often with watercolor—some of her beloved locations are Manchester by the Sea, coastal Maine and the southwest. At different points of her long career, the artist has chosen to work exclusively on watercolor for a period of time in the studio. The resulting still lives and landscapes became defining images for the artist as they were translated to large canvas works.
