New York Art Commentary
Rosenfeld's Mirrors of Nature
Commentary - NewYorkArtWorld.com
Rosenfeld's austere depictions of beach scenes are imagistic reveries, forms of consciousness, which as mentioned by Gaston Bachelard, constellate around the dream of the "idealizing imagination" as it opens out to ever and even higher planes of well-being. The artist's scenes take us away from the temporal and lull us into scenic wonders that in some sense is so removed in their vibrancy that these images appear before us with the languorous insistence of a lucid dream. Each image contains the essential features of timelessness; a horizon line, waves coming into the viewer of the beholder, inlets in the distance with perhaps an outline of an island appearing in the distance. These works have the same basic consistent features, rolling waves, foam tipped in-coming waves, intense pinkish sands, mid-to-high horizon lines, pellucid blue and often cloud-washed skies, the inclusion of scrub trees and bushes and devoid of the presence of sentient life. No animals, birds, or humans darken the plane of existence of nature herself.  
The Martha Vinyard Landscape Series
Duck Pond
Duck Pond
Town Beach
Town Beach
Great Pond
Great Pond

Rosenfeld has been able to transmit equally a sense of materiality as well as immateriality in her work. The depictions certainly represent or de-limit spatial boundaries, yet the different handling of the colors and their extreme sense of abstractedness makes these works quite atmospheric. In this sense the works seem to define a non-spatial state of mind as well as depict the geographic contours of certain existing locales.  
Rosenfeld is attempting and succeeding in a paradoxical task (some would say unrealizable task) of catching through the activity of painting something that is constantly changing. There is a universal tenor in the skies that Rosenfeld is able to capture; just as there is a universalizing impulse that wafts through each of her varying depictions of waves slowly making their hypnotic way up towards the sandy coves and beaches she is fond of painting.

There is hardly the feeling that Rosenfeld's images are literal transcriptions of the real. Admittedly, it would be hard to prove that these images are the result of painting through and in the plein-aire experience; yet more likely than not the feeling - quality of her image - making is that it is drawn from recalled experience and sensations. There is one facet of this work that is undeniable, however. And that is that an outdoor feeling is sought-after on the part of the painter. Each work gives off a strong sensation that one is present at a particular moment of weather and season as well as of time and of place.  
Mirrors of Nature - SerigraphsRiver Laune
 River Laune

Simultaneously, the solitude that permeates each image, that sense of distance and forlornness, is a primary emotional component in all of Rosenfeld's work. This solitude (not aloneness) is amplified by the feelings of exaltation or transcendence that one associates with the open skies that the artist is compelled to depict. The artist renditions of skies and shrubbery are really more than carriers of earth's wild spirituality. Instead there is a pure vitality that comes through her work. A pantheistic sensation, deep and focussed, is at the center of such a vision. This quiescent ecstasy is nourished by Rosenfeld's ephemeral light, the radiantly suffused color and the pared-down compositions of bands of color and her up-front acknowledgment of the flat pictorial plane.

The viewer is left with indelible impressions of mystery and wonderment. There is an equally strong sense of absolute stillness in each of the artist's works, which is compounded by a dramatic potentiality that pervades each of her scenes. Furthermore, one senses that underneath each of these works lie many renditions of what we get finally to see through the final layers of paint that have settled onto the pictorial surface. What appears to be so effortless and natural is achieved through force of will, intellect and character.

 

Gaston Bachelard notes "the poet helps us to discover destinal forces." In other words, the poet artist leads us in a teleological way to follow our unique star. The visual poem, which Rosenfeld recites, opens up a special place for us, one where we are enraptured by being temporarily out of casual time. (Everything), writes Bachelard, (in short, that loosens the ties of causation and reward, everything that denies our private history and even desire itself, everything that devalues both past and future is contained in the poetic moment.)

The artist brings to us revelatory instances of the here and now in the form of the ephemeral moment captured with rigor and tenderness, both. In that moment we glimpse ourselves, as in a mirror. Rosenfeld's portraits of the sea allow us to see, forsee and foreshadow our own transitoriness on the shores of time.

by D. F. Colman is an arts writer based in Manhattan.

Click here to view the Art Work Collection by Rosenfeld



NYAW.COM