Betsy Podlach’s “Lady on the Couch.” The artist creates many of her own paints, mixing egg tempera and oil for a luminous effect. CreditMichael Heller
Source: New York Times Betsy Podlach | Dec 25, 2015
In his poem “As I Walked Out One Evening,” W. H. Auden wrote: “And down by the brimming river/ I heard a lover sing/ Under an arch of the railway:/ ‘Love has no ending … .’”
Maybe no beginning, either — at least not in the paintings of Betsy Podlach, who lives in the Hamptons, grew up in Bedford, graduated cum laude from Harvard and later studied at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture.
“I don’t know what happened before, and I don’t know what happens after,” Ms. Podlach said of her portraits and the quietly dramatic, sensual moments she freezes in time: a nude sleeping on sheets patterned with delicate flowers; a golden-haired angel lost in thought and accompanied by a small menagerie; lovers embracing.
“I’m trying to find a woman who didn’t exist before. She’ll start telling me the story,” Ms. Podlach said of her artistic process while discussing the 22 works in “New Paintings by Betsy Podlach,” which opened on Dec. 13 and runs through Feb. 29 at the Lionheart Gallery in Pound Ridge.
The artist’s portraits, in which she often paints herself, were described by the newsletter ArtDaily as “Matisse-like” in feeling, and her predominantly figurative work combines the classicism of the Renaissance with the potency of expressionism.
“When I’m painting, I’m not thinking about what I want to say,” said Ms. Podlach, who said her work has been collected by the actor Christopher Walken, the former General Electric chief executive Jack Welch and the journalist George Stephanopoulos. “Nothing good will happen if I think consciously. I just listen to the painting. I do something and something else happens. You get momentum and magic starts happening.”
One constant throughout the work, Ms. Podlach said, is an undercurrent of love. But in her work, love does not adhere to a simplistic plotline. Instead, the way love is depicted feels like a taproot to the essence of a universal condition without beginning or end.
Betsy Podlach’s “Afternoon Nap” CreditMichael Heller
In working below the level of conscious thought, she creates canvases rich with intricate but ultimately opaque narratives. The paintings’ almost hypnotic appeal derives in part from a balance of what she calls “oppositions,” mystery and openness.
One of Ms. Podlach’s favorite paintings in the show, “Lady on the Couch,” depicts a blonde woman lying prone on an intensely red sofa, apparently sleeping, her right leg dangling off the edge. The shape of the sofa emphasizes her lithe contours. Sitting next to a volume of Auden’s poems on the floor is a black dog watching his muse expectantly. (The dog is the artist’s, Malcolm, who accompanied her to the exhibition’s opening.)
In all the works, the soul of the narrative rests in the models’ eyes — often closed — and in their lips, painted in embellishment of feminine beauty and emblematic of profound, not carnal, desire.
Susan D. Grissom, who opened the Lionheart Gallery five years ago, has called Ms. Podlach’s work “luscious,” and the news release announcing the exhibition describes the paintings as “sensual vignettes that captivate the imagination.”
Betsy Podlach’s “New Love”CreditMichael Heller
Walking through the show before it opened, Ms. Podlach spoke of how the inherent flatness of the canvas created equality among the figures, the animals, the small seas of pure color and the elements of fashion and couture that adorn the models. The artist’s balanced treatment of these details gives the paintings their underlying power.
One work, “Ballerina and Bunny,” depicts a dancer sitting on the floor with a white rabbit near her left shoulder, both of them cast against a black background. The most striking aspect of the painting is the luminosity of the white leotard and tutu, which results from egg tempera Ms. Podlach makes by mixing white pigment powder with a whole egg — rather than egg white — enabling her to render “light in between the layers.”
“Then I can just glaze (a little color, lots of oil to make the paint transparent) over the white and you have light coming through in a way that is in the layers,” Ms. Podlach said in an email.
The artist uses egg tempera combined with oils, some of which she creates herself, including a signature rose color. “The combination of egg tempera and oil paint is what many of the painters in the Renaissance used to sort of be able to draw into the oil — you have to know what you are doing and make sure the oil sits properly on top of it,” she added.
Born in 1964, Ms. Podlach studied painting with William P. Reimann and Alfred De Credico at Harvard, and went on to the New York Studio School, which led to an art fellowship and residency at the International School of Art in Umbria, Italy, where her “figurative art evolved into the signature expressionistic style that defines her work today,” the gallery says.
Recalling her time in Italy, Ms. Podlach said, “I went there to study with Nicolas Carone — he was a teacher who was a force — incredible man and incredible artist.” Mr. Carone, who died in 2010, lived near Jackson Pollock in the Hamptons and exhibited with the Abstract Expressionists.
“Nick was Italian, so loved the drawings of Titian and Michelangelo, but he was an Abstract Expressionist through and through,” Ms. Podlach said in an email.
Ms. Podlach said she tried “to incorporate the full, unbroken figure into the methods and other aspects of Abstract Expressionism.” She said she aimed to “paint the figure like an Abstract Expressionist but also like Titian.”
At the gallery, she put her thought process this way: “I’ll keep the figure. That will be my way out of the dragon’s cave. I can’t get too lost in the abstraction.”
“New Paintings by Betsy Podlach” is accompanied by “Paper Sculpture Installation” by Barbara Owen. The exhibitions remain on display through Feb. 29 at the Lionheart Gallery, located at 27 Westchester Avenue in Pound Ridge, N.Y. For more information, call 914-764-8689 or go to thelionheartgallery.com.
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