But the many variations suggest that Westfall is responding to a wide range of imagery, information, art historical awareness, and, of course, personal impulses. Such associations are not a matter of appropriation but rather, of working within a greatly expanded contemporary visual and semiotic frame of reference. If one of his goals is immediacy of impact, another is a subsequent richness of contemplative experience that motivated spiritualists such as Mondrian and Malevich, and the creators of Eastern mandalas. The work moves between a meditative orientation and everyday, vernacular readings. Westfall’s paintings, while rigorous in visual concept and exacting execution, are idiosyncratically allusive and expressive. His execution of new work within a field of apparent contradictions is a masterful balancing act.

Robert Berlind, 2013

From his meditations on Matisse, Walker brought a summery light, cooler, and harder than Matisse’s Mediterranean light, into his own new pictures. For form he used the wave, blue and white rhythmic bands, as old as any form in western art, and landscape forms, islands, rocks, and the blunt finger of Seal Point became shield-like. At the horizon line a thickly painted island often appears. The paint is raw, viridian, and lavish, a celebration of seeing. It fits Walker’s maxim to himself: “Stop trying to make the paint look like something it isn’t. Goya, Chardin, Vermeer…you know you’re looking at paint. You need the ability to pick up this colored mud and turn it into air.

William Corbett, 2015

“There is a lot of symmetry in life, of one kind or another. One of the neatest things about nature is that it is totally chaotic at all times, while it is simultaneously totally organized. And a lot of that organization has to do with symmetry. Symmetry is life; it’s reality. That is magic. Painting, hopefully, can do that too.

The symmetry of the reflections is a different story. In the far north, twilight lasts a long time. If you paddle at just the right pace on a calm day, you will see in the water a perfect reflection of the real world. This upside-down world exists just like the “real” world, although it’s not actually there. It becomes like a ghost; it seems to complete reality.

If the water is clear, it further complicates and completes the meaning of life. The things we see under the water — fallen trees, submerged plants and fish and such — are real, but they exist in a realm where we humans are denied entrance. So there is a combination of real, unreal, and also unavailable. That is mind altering. I want to generate that in my painting — not describe its appearance. So far I am not totally satisfied with my efforts.”

Adapted from interview with Jennifer Samet for Beer with a Painter, 2017

These paintings record place, but they also record the act of translating place into paint- the artist’s intervention. Her distinct and fluid brush strokes seem casual at first, but they are precisely and elegantly laid down.

Seeing through to things has been an enduring theme in her painting: what windows frame, how they shape, limit, focus, reflect or do not reflect, depending on whether they retain their glass panes, how they reject or welcome, distort, how they imply choice-to look or not to look. These windows, then, frame Dodd’s views, actual and metaphorical.

Deborah Weisgall, 2003

In the past, my paintings took years to complete. I sought to create works that required exactitude and adhered to the disciplines devised by artists throughout history. These works are contemplative and bring great meaning to me.

However, my life did not follow a predictable path, and my new paintings started to reflect my internal and external conflicts. As a result, where I once almost froze each moment in silence, I began to reveal the forces that shape us all. So here in these first paintings I explore a path toward freedom as a visual storyteller.

Brett Bigbee, 2018

One of the most startling things about Ms. Adams’s works is that their flat surfaces, as active, various and sometimes seemingly chaotic as they are, still maintain clockwork precision and clarity. It’s as if we were seeing the stages of growth or the steps of transformation, each accompanied by its gaseous residue or shed skin.

Lance Esplund, 2005