Jill Nathanson

Some of the additions are featured in The Evolution of Mark-making, now on display on the second floor. Project Atrium artist Shinique Smith donated her Something from Nothing Bundle (2008). The hanging satellite contains clothing and accessories donated to a church in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which came to the artist when New Orleans refused clothing in lieu of funds.

Jill Nathanson is a talented painter who makes magic on canvas by using a technique of poured polymer, which forms overlapping layers of translucency that provide unfamiliar albeit fresh gorgeous hues and are delightful to examine and savor. Over the last four decades, she has deepened her study of color dynamics through methodically delving into chance and risk to ultimately create unity. Berry Campbell, New York. (http://www.berrycampbell.com/)    

Christine Berry and Martha Campbell launched their gallery to bring attention to the works of a selection of postwar and contemporary artists and revealing how these artists have advanced ideas and lessons in powerful and new directions. Berry Campbell provided five paintings by Jill Nathanson for MOCA Jacksonville's Confronting the Canvas: Women of Abstraction. Berry traveled to Jacksonville to see the exhibition, and we asked her a few questions.

Noah Becker Visits the New York Studio of Artist Jill Nathanson

Nathanson became fascinated by color painting at Bennington College. She arrived at the school in the mid-1970s, when it was at the center of color field abstraction. From Kenneth Noland and Larry Poons, she learned to avoid composing through dark and light tones and to give color an ever-greater role in structuring a painting. Over the last four decades, she has deepened her exploration of color dynamics, seeking to transmit affective realities of seeing. She courts chaos in her method, through employing chance, but she also works methodically—each overlay of color takes a day to dry.  For the viewer, her paintings evoke energies in the body as well as optical experience, and the physical presence of each painting resists immediate assimilation, involving a dynamic, layered search for unity.

Reports of the death of painting have been greatly exaggerated. Not least, its survival is due to artists like Jill Nathanson, whose current show at Berry Campbell combines traditional approaches with new technologies to create paintings that could only have been made in the 21st century.

You can get lost in the mind of Jill Nathanson. In her captivating paintings, overlapping planes of translucent color generate expansive surfaces rich with free-form shapes.  Her ethereal compositions seem weightless in the way they evoke slow, sliding movement.  Although her abstraction is assuredly non-objective, she paints “the world of things” according to the artist herself.   Just when we’re immersed in the deep layers of polymer resin, patches of acrylic bring us back to reality. MARY NEGRO (2012)

For me, the best paintings in “Jill Nathanson: Fluid Measure,” are, on the whole, the larger and simpler ones, those which incorporate only a limited number of colors. The most complex and ambitious of these larger ones is “In Fluence” (2014). Situated in the front space of the gallery, it has cloudy sky blues in the upper left part of the canvas, deep red sweeping on the lower left, tans in various shapes in the upper right, and greens on the lower right with touches of cream.

El Gran Otro an Argentine based International Contemporary Art magazine features Berry Campbell Artist, Jill Nathanson