Another book closed

December Challenge / Number / One more gone
Cover of an art book from my library showing one of Jane Freilicher's Long Island scenes.

The New York painter Jane Freilicher died yesterday. She was 90 years old.
The New York Times said, "She once compared her plunge into painting to the taking of religious vows."

Freilicher came up in the time of the Abstract Expressionists, but she preferred figurative images and went her own way. Her characteristic subject was a still life with a distant view in the background, either a view of Manhattan (example here) or of the marshes viewed from her Long Island home.

I have followed this artist for many years and find her work uplifting and charming, as well as highly skillful. I'm sorry she is no longer working among us, and I hope her death will cause the critics to take a second look and give her the appreciation she deserves.

“My painting is an emotional reaction
to something I find beautiful in the subject,
which provides the energy, the impetus to paint.
I’m quite willing to sacrifice fidelity to the subject to the vitality of the image,
a sensation of the quick, lively blur of reality
as it is apprehended rather than analyzed.
I like to work on that borderline —
opulent beauty in a homespun environment.”

— artist Jane Freilicher, r.i.p.