Luminous Flux in the Paintings of Barbara Lifton
By D.F.Colman

Among the primary experiences the viewer becomes aware of as he gazes upon Barbara Lifton’s paintings is the generosity with which the artist opens up her space and creates volumetric shifts between her brushstrokes, very much in keeping with the late and post-Impressionists.  The other aspect which is remarkable is the air that circulates, seemingly through her paintings as well. There is bounteousness for example to her vividly realized structural volumes in the small 14 x 18 inch work entitled Wedding Boats (2006).  These forms convene to recall what the ostensible subject of her painting purports to be: vessels in a harbor. Yet subject is one thing and theme and content is something else entirely in art. In this work the artist persuades us to examine every part of the canvas so much is it brimming with vitality.

Her painterly passages invoke the sea-air breeze, the sails and masts of boats, surely. Yet the artist has managed to suggest so much more. The nestling of these white-hulled vessels upon one another and their leaning into one another suggest an affinity of one form with another as well as an equal and insistent separation and distance. The white forms are open and well defined.  They recall veils, canopies, or shrouds as well as marriage sheets unfurled to the light of a crisp new day. Lifton’s paintings are small yet resolutely painted with a great gift for nuance and daring. In this work the artist’s incisively modeled forms remind the viewer of the muscular forms of Marsden Hartley that are suffused with clarity and luminosity; his iconic outlines impel us to confront the harshness and astringency of secluded nature while always insinuating that flux is at the core of  life. Wedding Boats offers us not only a scene but also a proposition: it leads us into the center of the painting leaving us gravityless yet grounded within the ever-expanding whiteness that is the boats.

In Madison Square (2005) the artist manages to assert a more Signac-like aura, with its two repoussoir trees at the left and right of the mid ground, offering us perhaps a natural proscenium arch which offers the eye the proper stage for the activity which is taking pace within the glen of trees and bushes.  We are ineluctably led to the center of this work, inescapably being directed by the artist to gaze upon the small centralized figures which have congregated within nature for a picnic or a conversation depicted with a modulation of colors which stays close to the object’s form but does away with exact contours to give us an impression or sensation of congested space.

As in Cezanne Lifton creates an illusion of depth as well as of air and light while keeping the surface plane vividly in mind. The illusion of depth and space therefore is subjugated just enough by the surface quality without having that illusion being manipulated to the point of unrecognizability. The images that are so dependent on her energized coloristic planes somehow work on the eyes independently of what the forms are meant to suggest mimetically (people, trees etc). Instead every character, every representational element manages to become part an abstract surface pattern while keeping its integrity intact. In Jungle Jim (2005) a 22x 28” work Lifton has presented a work that churns and broils with energy.  Again at the center we see forms recalling children who are rushing to the center of the picture plane, advancing towards a structure, bound for play. This scene amplified by Lifton’s use of greens and yellows involves the viewer at a fever pitch.

Barbara Lifton’s freshly and delicately cultivated artworks with their pictorial compositions matched by their harmony and form each contain a dual momentum. As static unchanging images (paintings always are) they nevertheless seem to be filled with an internal pulsing, a luminosity that belies their stillness. What we sense  are physical objects whose unchanging painted forms are paradoxically imbued with the dynamism of the ephemeral.  It is this “passing into” sensation which permeates the artist’s nuanced vision and that sustains each work.  It allows Barbara Lifton’s painterly vision to emanate with doubled presence: flux suffused with grace.