Winter White
Northern Daughters Annex Gallery, Village Wine & Coffee • Shelburne, VT • northerndaughters.com • January 16–February 28, 2021
The curators of Winter White expected that the theme would call forth works with an emphasis on composition as befits the reduced palette of winter’s muted colors. Their aesthetic hunch has been confirmed in the art presented in this striking exhibit.
Julia Jensen is a landscape painter whose canvases border on the mystical. In From the Other Side, the eye is led along a grey-blue path that stretches through a snowy expanse to a low horizon line. The white clouded sky dominates the painting, reflecting white fields and sparse vegetation below. Jensen’s command of space is masterful, and the sky seems to be stretching into infinity.
Ice Flow, a diptych in shades of blue, green, and grey by Erika Lawlor Schmidt, gives the sense of being inside a frozen mass, experiencing the light coming in. The transparency of the monoprint process, the floating forms, and play with lines of light contribute to the sense of abstraction. The forms are distinct, yet merging, mysterious, as if exploring the essence of ice.
Hannah Sessions and Hannah Morris both paint more recognizable Vermont scenes of winter. Sessions loves the interplay of winter’s subdued colors. In Group of Goats on Snowy Ledge, she includes animals with their heavy winter coats juxtaposed against planes of soft color. Morris shares a community of stylized skaters on an expanse of a blue-hued pond. Her painting, Saturday, seems to be about relationships—skaters finding each other in the joyous freedom of a dance on ice.
Four White Grids by Matthew Monk is a nuanced exploration of myriad tones of white, reminiscent of Robert Ryman’s series of white paintings. Monk incorporates discarded and found materials in carefully calibrated placements. All types and sizes of paper make their way into the self-imposed grid execution—graph paper, lined, scribbled notes, a narrow strip with numbers. The subtle color tones have a natural feel. Wabi-sabi comes to mind—an acceptance of the imperfect and worn as part of beauty. The collages have grown through the interplay of many materials and processes. The richness of the final, understated result is endlessly fascinating, as is the world from which they came.
Winter White is a true celebration of the season through the eyes of artists who know it well. Their views are enticing and offer an intimate view into the subtlety of winter’s gifts.
—B. Amore