My favorite Freilicher paintings–I wrote about them once–were her extraordinary crosses of still-life and landscape. It is one thing to turn a still-life into a landscape or even vice versa, but to create an image that maintains the integrity of both genres is something else again. Jane’s beautiful hand makes it look easy but it is very hard to do. Try it.
The protagonists of these great paintings, a nasturtium and a city, say, or a peony and a salt marsh, have complex relationships. They bob and weave with and against each other, moving gently but with more than a touch of contained conflict. They punch as often as they caress.
These are courageous paintings suggesting that a button of color — a flower or a dab of paint – can make the world shake.
Jane Freilicher is my idea of an artist. Her long career, her endless invention, her intelligence, her attention to the job at hand, her integrity – and all her wonderful paintings, which is what we have left now.
Her luminous color–her exemplary life.
From artcritical’s calendar for December 12, 2014:
Presenting Jane: 90th Birthday Celebration for Jane Freilicher