This is a review of an article written by Louis Bury from Hyperallergic about Claire Sherman’s paintings of plant life and nature.
Between March and early April, Sherman’s work was displayed at the DC Moore Gallery in her exhibition “New Pangaea.” Various paintings of ferns, vines, waterfalls and the various flora living in nature are depicted in her works. These landscapes are all skillfully painted in oil, and many of them are created on canvases about 70 x 60 inches or even larger. Bury notes that the painting on the right, “Leaves and Vines” (2017), exposes the “sun-covered foliage” beyond the darker green thicket like a “curtain left a crack open,” while the painting on the left, “Waterfall,” (2019) puts much of the focus on the water and the cliff side, allowing the white water to cascade and fill the canvas. Individual leaves can be distinguished in the foliage through both her brushwork and her use of analogous colors; the wide variety of greens differentiates the leaves from each other but also is able to create a sense of unity in all of her paintings despite how they point in all sorts of directions.
Bury also observes that Sherman’s artwork appears figurative overall, but upon closer inspection her brushwork is shown to have the expressiveness and sense of abstract mark-making. I was uncertain about the definition of mark-making, and found that it describes the various lines and textures that can be used to create gesture in art. As seen in her paintings, this use of abstract and figurative qualities creates the intense, rushing sense of motion that can be felt in her waterfalls and also give her plants a “dynamic” and lively feeling, as if showing the life in them even if they are not as visually animated as a waterfall, like in the rightmost painting above, “Grass and Ferns” (2019). Even inorganic objects like caves feel “alive” as seen in her painting “Cave” (2018), which I feel exemplifies her ability to create life in her art.
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