The Romantic writer John Keats once observed that all one needs to write poetry is a “feeling for light and shade.” Nancy Friedland and Ryan Dobrowski’s lucent compositions make a similar case, not for poetry but for painting. Both artists modulate the effects of light and darkness to wrest significance from ambiguity. Evincing the generative potential of irresolution, their pictures tarry the porous boundaries between night and day, confusing the distinctions between the ethereal and material world, the province of dreams and reality. In both cases, the viewer is not a passive observer but an active participant, implicated in the exposition of each painting: to see the landscape shrouded in dawn’s early light is for the painting to be of dawn and not twilight.

As a former photographer, Friedland deftly translates between mediums, affording her paintings an intensity and drama often associated with film. The photographer’s impulse to memorialize the ephemeral manifests in her paintings of dappled landscapes, adumbral roads, and portraits of her children swimming, sleeping, or captured mid-movement, seemingly unaware of the artist’s lens. Her brushy marks convey urgency and immediacy, animating an air of spontaneity and candor. The occasional lens flare, flash, and hazy penumbras lift the scenes from the mundane into the otherworldly and surreal. 

Friedland employs chiaroscuro, the rhythmic interplay of light and shade, to explore the protean relationship between the seen and unseen, the perceived and the intuited. What is otherwise elusive, like sensation, melody, and atmosphere, assumes a tangible form here. The resulting tableaus of nature and people are imbued with a rich interiority and emotional timbre. The world on the canvas, like the one beyond its frame, is in the midst of continuous change. Envisaging her subjects during liminal periods further emphasizes this sense of ongoingness, gesturing to the past while suggesting the future.

Dobrowski’s surreal landscapes also simultaneously evoke the thin veil of dawn and the velvety scrim of dusk. Curvaceous coastlines and austere mountains flicker back and forth, revealing something of themselves in both lights. But as Friedland levies shadow in the service of depth, Dobrowski exploits light’s austere flattening effects. His pared-down forms, elliptical lines, and multifaceted layers meet, merge, and separate in kaleidoscopic variations. Where patches of scumble and staccato brushstrokes alternate with flat lambent planes of muted earthen hues, the world as we know it is rendered anew. 

Russet, olive, saffron, and slate gray shapes imagine towering trees, pastoral fields, flowering thickets, ocean tides, and waterways. Other times, colors coalesce in amorphic, inchoate contours loosely recalling clouds, foliage, and celestial bodies. Taken together, the two modes of relating bespeak an artistic vision that allows nature's enigmatic and inexplicable energies to overflow the rigid constraints of straightforward representation. In this way, both artists conjure life’s obdurate mysteries, enlivening the material world of people, nature, and things. —Tara Anne Dalbow