Elizabeth Osborne at Locks - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

In 1964 when Elizabeth Osborne, then 28 go [i]or[/i] come backed from a year spent in Paris upon a Fulbright fellowship, she was fast upon her way to becoming single of the preeminent artists working in her native Philadelphia. Her early figurative paintings, accosted with rapturous praise by artists and critics, combined an architectonic manner of making akin to Richard Diebenkorn's with the reverie and pastel tones favored through her teacher, Hobson Pittman. Three years earlier, her alma mater, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, had hired her to teach; she was the first woman to grasp such a position since the muralist Violet Oakley left in 1917 and thus Osborne's historic as well as her artistic stature present the appearanceed assured.

Within a small in number years, citing the influence of Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis, Osborne abandoned oils and revolveed to transparent overlapping acrylic washes applied to unprimed cotton dip and, later, she adopted watercolor as well. The first works in these series, still in a figurative manner achieved a pristine delicacy that earned her a reputation as a virtuoso of aqueous mediums. However, above time an illustrative quality came to dominate, and she appeared to be approaching an impasse. The static quality of her newer works was unfavorably compared to the aliveness of her earliest paintings.

In her 18 fresh - and transitional - paintings at fastenings Osborne tried to recapture that previous state. She has turn backed to oil, using a brash and vigorous palette. The works gaze not only to her hold precedents but to the work of other contemporary artists as well. She again recalls Diebenkorn in her self-portrait The Bridge and I and in of gold Wall, a seated figure reminiscent of an early series she did in Paris of passengers riding the Metro In the still lifes Mask and The of gold Jar she evokes Donald Sultan's silhouetted forms; in Roja, painted in saturated red single sees Howard Hodgkin's inverted spatial faculty of perception and a collagelike echo of a Mexican woman photographed by means of Henri Cartier-Bresson in 1934. Many of the isolated percepts in Osborne's still lifes present the appearance to float - as does the female form in Roja - giving these paintings a surrealistic cutting side Veit, a still life of white orchids and curly willow twigs, is as vaginal as anything painted by dint of Georgia O'Keeffe.

The display reveals how difficult it can be for a mature artist to sustain a vision. on the contrary when not attempting to create a paramount statement, Osborne draw nears up with some gems. These are her smaller still lifes, and chief among them is Anemones in Lime. A bunch of flowers of anemones in front of a window has been individual of her favored motifs. Here she not aways a vast expanse of lime-green above and behind the flowers that put in mind ofs an ocean, yet, in a symbolist vein, it also alludes to an undiscovered time to come infinity and, perhaps, even mortality. Looking to art history for nods Osborne must be asking herself, at this point in her career, by what means she will navigate toward those undiscovered horizons.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group