Susan Shatter at Fischbach - painting exhibit, New York, New York

In her fresh series of landscape paintings, Susan Shatter move rounds from her former large-scale watercolors of ancient stones eroded hills and mountains to small-scale egg-tempera-onwood depictions of nature's more transient heat and light. Brilliant fly opens of sunlight through clouds, lightning flashes in dark skies and red-hot erupting volcanoes with snaking lava rivers are the controls of her paintings from 1991 and 1992 which range in their largest dimensions from 7 to 12 inches. Eighteen of these works ringed the walls of a small gallery, creating an eye-level band of vivid spectacle.

The works are arranged in a untie sequence of dawns, storms and cataclysmic eruptions, close of the days and then night skies, which could be read as a metaphoric narrative of reliance fear and disaster, winding down to either a promising calm or a dark uncertainty, depending upon one's turn of mind. Shatter manages optical events of almost painful intensity with her thinly applied ovum tempera, its delicate matte finish an unlikely vehicle for similar high chromatic drama.

Dry-brush applications of color, as in the fogs and sky of First Light, Last Light and Lightning Strikes and the mountainsides of Weeping Volcano, loan an ethereal effect--appropriate, perhaps, for atmosphere, on the contrary imparting a surprising transience to the mountain. sum of two units paintings evoke the spiritual press of Blake's visionary heavens: firmament Lights, a dramatic black-and-white fireball in a dark heavens and Luminescence, a primary-color sundown of dusky blue skies balanced with r nebulositys and golden rays. In Sunburst and Erupting Volcano, Shatter achieves blindingly heated whites and fiery reds that are multiplied in her total effect presentation. Taken together, these paintings of awesome natural phenomena also entreat up images of infrared photography and television depictions of the large bay War. The artist has named individual of her lightning-flash paintings untilled Storm, so it would strike one as being that the mix of incendiary imagery is intentional, a nod to man-made disasters as well as natural individuals While these little paintings might have generated level more heat without their drab earth-tone frames, they still manage to be incandescent with the sinister beauty of fate's terrible indifference.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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