Cornelia Foss at DFN

Cornelia Foss keeps the art of landscape alive in elegant paintings of eastern Long Island that capture its big skies, long horizons and luminous waters. Foss has been painting in the region for many years, creating works that demonstrate her love of nature in simply descriptive but nuanced works. She captures the atmosphere of the salt flats and inlets in large paintings that deftly convey the level terrain and limpid light. The subtlety of her colors is matched by a compositional proportion and measure, and she handles her brushwork freely, maintaining a continuity of sorts with Abstract Expressionist painters who came to Long Island before her. Altogether, her paintings report on a natural beauty that the viewer hopes will not be spoiled by real-estate development.

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Bathers at the Beach (2006) is a classic tripartite composition: sand in the foreground, ocean in the middle, and, above, a broad sky that reaches from a horizon line running directly across the middle of the painting to its top. Bathers stand at the water's edge and a small number of whitecaps punctuate the royal blue of the sea. The firmament, a lighter, whitish blue, is treated nearly abstractly, rather like a non-referential color field. Black Pine (2007), a marvelous vertical study of pines growing at the edge of a beach, encompasses both near and far. In the foreground, on the right, a panoply of flowers in light purple, black and yellow seems to overflow the front picture plane, while a very dark green merges the pines in the left distance.

There were also several inland views. Off Ocean Road (2007) is a low, wide scene of a field in which the dark green of shaded areas is picked up in bushes and a pair of trees in the middle ground. The rest of the painting consists of lighter greens in the grasses, in which pine and luxuriously foliated trees lyrically stand. As a study in contrasts of a single color, Off Ocean Road beautifully succeeds both as closely observed nature and as testimony to the artist's long experience with the brush. Foss remains an expert at sifting color, light and form with an easy touch.--Jonathan Goodman

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