Jill Nathanson

Tuesday, Dec. 19, 2023 at 6:00pm 

Hosted by the Art Students League of New York

Phyllis Harriman Mason Gallery, 2nd Fl 215 W 57th Street, New York

This panel discussion will bring together artists who have both studio and pedagogical practices to discuss abstraction and its teaching today. Participants include League instructors Jill Nathanson and James Little, as well as Carl E. Hazlewood, Harriet Korman, and John Mendelsohn. Moderated by Mario Naves.

Event tickets: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/painters-talking-what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-abstraction-tickets-754042339937?aff=oddtdtcreator 

Proving that no force is stronger than girl power, Frampton Co and Berry Campbell present Women Choose Women at Exhibition The Barn.

Ophir and Friends: A Tribute to Ophir Agassi
Curated by Karen Wilkin and Christine Kee
November 6 - December 18, 2022
View Works by Jill Nathanson

The third installation of the Prints & Drawings gallery in the Nancy and Rich Kinder building opened to the public on January 7, 2022. This gallery highlights modern and contemporary works from the Prints & Drawings collection.

The Nancy and Rich Kinder Building is dedicated to the Museum’s international collections of modern and contemporary art. The soaring spaces feature displays that span media encompassing painting and sculpture, craft and design, video, and immersive installations. The wide-ranging collection of Prints & Drawings are on view in gallery 207, split into four sections. Objects in the first section, “After Dark: Night at the Turn of the Century,” show artists’ responses to the aesthetic possibilities and shifting cultural connotations of night; those in the second, “Drawn to Color,” represent works on paper by Color Field artists and others who explore the expressive potential of color. The last two sections include “Meticulous,” which highlights works featuring repetitive, accumulative mark-making, and “Celebrating Tamarind Institute at 62,” and installation of lithographs produced by women artists at this important workshop from the 1960s to today.

The second section showcases works on paper by twentieth-century Color Field artists, as well as contemporary artists influenced by the movement’s embrace of pure color as a vehicle for expression. Using a diverse array of media, including oil, acrylic, watercolor, ink, and pastel, the artists in “Drawn to Color” produce abstract compositions that engage in varied ways with color’s evocative potential. Works by seminal figures such as Mark Rothko, Sam Francis, and Helen Frankenthaler hang alongside ones by living artists like Terrell James and Emmi Whitehorse, illustrating the continuing legacy of the Color Field movement and expanding the scope of its canon.

Jill Nathanson
Breath Woven 11, 2019
Acrylic and polymers on Yupo paper
24 12 x 18 inches
Collection of Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

View Works by Jill Nathanson

Jill Nathanson in conversation with Thu Nhat Pham, THR Editorial Assistant


Jill Nathanson, Light Wrestle, 2020, 45 1/2 x 95 1/2 inches. Private Collection.

How did the paintings [in the folio] come to be?

It’s hard to know where to start. I think abstract painting, for any serious painter, is a manifestation of a whole understanding of what painting is about and what abstract painting might do. The paintings manifest something about painting and about abstract painting: I’ll leave that to the side.

I’ll say that the paintings in the folio are painted with thick poured acrylic polymer paints, and they’re very transparent. All the paint is absolutely transparent, and it’s poured onto a wood panel that’s been prepared and painted white so that the light reflects off of it. This is a very unforgiving process: pouring thick plastic onto wood and letting it dry and then pouring more thick transparent plastic on top of it. There’s no room for a mistakes or corrections really.

And so, I worked from studies. I worked from transparent plastic studies, which take me a very long time to create. So, a lot of the creative process goes on a small scale and the paintings are enlarged versions of these color studies. There are certain things that I want each color study to accomplish visually, and I want that visual experience to call forth all kinds of other intellectual, emotional, spiritual kinds of responses. But it all really starts with a small six by nine inch plastic study.

Really, it also goes back to discoveries that I made when I was an undergraduate at Bennington College. I discovered what was then a really important art movement: Color Field painting. I fell in love with it, and I was encouraged to be experimental. I experimented with acrylic paint and discovered that I just loved thick transparent color and that working with thick transparent colors, sometimes in relationship to opaque color, I felt that I could make discoveries that I hadn’t seen anybody else work with.

A lot of my life as a painter, over almost 50 years, has been about pure color relationships, color in fields, transparency, and materiality.

So that’s sort of an intro to how things get going.

What are the oppositions that you try to balance in your painting process?

What are the oppositions that I try to balance in my painting process? You initially asked me if there were three words that I could choose to describe my painting process and my approach to painting. I kind of bristled or pulled back from that because I don’t think that there are descriptive words that I’d like to use. I feel like there are challenges or oppositions that my painting is involved with and that my whole painting life has been involved with trying to engage.

One of them would be “Shape Versus Field.” This probably sounds very meaningless and like “what’s the difference between shape and field?” But, in fact, it has a very important position in the history of abstraction and particularly abstraction over the last, say 50 years. At a certain point in high modernism in America there was a quality of field in painting that was very important, I would say, from Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock. And then into the pure color painting of color field painters, there was a sense of the painting as being kind of a field of energy or maybe opposing energies or moving energies. But it was kind of anti-shape. It was polyphonic painting where every part of the surface was equally important. It became kind of allover painting (that’s one way to talk about it). But I would say painting as a field that transmits a kind of energy was very important in high modernism.

Then that really fell out of fashion.

Now, some of my favorite painters, let’s say Amy Sillman who is a very wonderful contemporary painter, are very focused on shape and discovering new ways of thinking about shape: shape that’s flat, shape that kind of pushes and pulls in space, etcetera. There’s kind of been a re-emergence of a focus on shape. And I love a lot of that painting. It’s so exciting to me. I think it’s a wonderful moment in abstract painting. There are so many people I could mention who were involved with creating a new feeling of shape, kind of funky, a little bit troubling, a little bit awkward, kind of anti-heroic. I love this painting, but I would say that for me: I’m involved with kind of negotiating that opposition between field and shape and not having one take over from the other. So, “Field and Shape,” and when I say “Field,” I mean color as an energy field, and how do you have an energy field that also has a shape. They don’t really work together, but that’s kind of the ambition and the process and the way of thinking or hoping or approaching a painting or the story I tell myself about what I’m doing. Whether it’s overstated or not, that’s how I talk about it to myself.

Another one is “Color as light / color as matter.” Paint color has two realities. It’s gloppy, expensive stuff you get in jars or tubes or whatever. You mix it and it’s totally material. It’s glop but it’s also light. You put colors together, they vibrate, and you have a quality of light that you can create in a painting. The opposition between those two things, I think, is so key to the magic of painting throughout history and really is a focus of abstract painting. How do you find your way to really give that experience of the material of paint, simultaneously the light quality of paint, and simultaneously the object of a painting, which is a big, heavy thing that’s stuck on a wall. It costs money and takes up space, and it’s very, very material, and how do you have it feel like it is this transcendent light kind of a thing at the same time as you’re not making an illusion? So, that material light thing is a big biggie for me.

A third opposition that I was thinking about: a range of abstract painting as an image because everything, every painting, has an image, and abstract painting as a process of looking, a kind of meditation. I think every painting that’s worth its salt is both: there’s an image that you look at (“Oh yeah! I see that image, I like that image!”), but it’s also a process that engages you in putting it together, as in time with your optical nerves or muscles or whatever works in your eyes, which I don’t really know that much about. It’s a process and it’s also an image.

So those are the things: “Shape versus Field,” “Color in paint versus Material in paint,” and “Image versus Process.” They’re all kind of interrelated, but I think it’s worth it to kind of tease them out.

Sheldon Museum of Art will a conversation with artist Jill Nathanson and curator and critic Karen Wilkin on Oct. 26 at 5:30 p.m. via on Zoom. Nathanson’s painting “Cantabile” is a new acquisition on view at Sheldon in the exhibition, “Point of Departure: Abstraction 1958–Present.”

Registration is required for the free event.

Nathanson completed her undergraduate studies at Bennington College in Vermont, where she worked in the artistic orbit once occupied by Helen Frankenthaler. Although both artists are known for reducing painting to its physical essence, Nathanson’s immersive and sensual paintings stand in a category of their own. Consisting of unusual hues of overlapping layers of variable translucency, they create emotionally nuanced experiences with yet enough tension to engage the viewer’s contemplation. Her most recent solo show was “Jill Nathanson: Light Phrase” at Berry Campbell Gallery, New York, in January 2021.

Wilkin is a New York-based curator and critic. Educated at Barnard College and Columbia University, she is the author of monographs on Stuart Davis, David Smith, Anthony Caro, Isaac Witkin, Kenneth Noland, Helen Frankenthaler, Giorgio Morandi, Georges Braque, Wayne Thiebaud and Hans Hofmann, and has organized international exhibitions of their work. She was a juror for the American Pavilion of the 2009 Venice Biennale and a contributing editor of the Stuart Davis and Hans Hofmann paintings catalogues raisonné. The contributing editor for art for the Hudson Review and a regular contributor to The New Criterion, Hopkins Review, and the Wall Street Journal, Wilkin teaches in the New York Studio School’s MFA program.

This online event is part of the museum’s CollectionTalk series, which features live discussions about artwork and exhibitions with artists, curators, and historians. On Nov. 11, the series continues with artist Odili Donald Odita in conversation with Tyler Green, host of the Modern Art Notes Podcast. For more information on Sheldon Museum of Art and its programming, visit its website.

CollectionTalk: Jill Nathanson and Karen Wilkin
October 26, 2021
5:30 pm CT

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Comparisons between color-field painters Jill Nathanson (born 1955 and Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011) come naturall, although each is undeniably her own person—and her artwork is uniquely remarkable.

Save the date October 26th at 5:30 pm CT for a cocktail-hour zoom with Jill nathanson and author, curator, and historian Karen Wilkin. Join us for a discussion that will surely cover Sheldon's recent acquisition of Nathanson's painting, Cantabile, and the common ground she shared with Helen Frankenthaler.

To attend, RSVP to Laurel Ybarra at laurel.ybarra@unl.edu or 402.472.1454

"Point of Departure,” the fall’s major exhibition at Sheldon Museum of Art, takes its name from a 1964 album by jazz pianist Andrew Hill, a recording that reaches back toward Bach, but nearly 60 years after it was recorded, continues to point to the future.

In similar fashion, the paintings that fill Sheldon’s north galleries reach back to a point just after abstraction’s mid-20th century peak and take non-objective painting forward for six decades, pointing toward what is yet to come.

Impressively, the visually striking, intellectually and historically rich exhibition is primarily drawn from Sheldon’s collection of 20th and 21st century art that is unmatched by any other university museum in the country.

“We have so much abstraction and we’re well known for abstraction, starting in 1910,” said Wally Mason, Sheldon’s director and chief curator. “We shifted from abstract painting to abstract sculpture during George's (Neubert) tenure. But we always acquired some. In my time, this is something we’re continuing to do.”

In using 1958 as its starting date, Mason, who curated the exhibition, ensured that “Point of Departure” would include little work from the “first generation” of abstract expressionists, excluding oft-seen Sheldon gems by Mark Rothko, Willem deKooning, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still and Robert Motherwell. Read More

Jill Nathanson, a lifelong advocate of Color Field abstraction, wields a bright turn of phrase in her third Berry Campbell exhibition, expressing important feelings about color, proximity, and concord. Noticing the disruption of my fingers, an additional element, through Nathanson’s painting thumbnails on a checklist printed on thin paper was enough to convince me of the sheer power of the work exhibited here in which all layers on flat wooden panels sum to a fully multi-dimensional space. The acoustic quality of the paintings, hinted at by select titles (Harp, Chordzephyr, Woodwind), is heard as a result of this spatial illusion. The painter’s biographical information, and particularly her upbringing in a musical household, furthers this reading of her work. 

The paintings reach deep rhythms and rich harmonies with their expansive palettes and chiffon likeness. In Only a Friend, Nathanson mixes a platonic ideal of bleached apricot and buttery daffodil shades in the center with flanks of bubbly gray-blue and still sea-glass. If briefly considered a landscape, the viewer is unable to differentiate between window and curtains, resulting in pleasing surface tension, each edge becoming a true crevice rather than a point of delineation. An oily olive ribbon to the right, likely applied post-pour, suggests a moment of organic activity, such as the drag of a wave onto coast. 

Nathanson’s implemented notion of “color desire” similarly tugs on the viewer as one’s gaze travels across each work; the painter is uniquely aware of the somatic effects of art and its relationship to pulse. Flexing works such as Light Wrestle provoke a push-and-pull response. This active relationship with the panels is determined by the immaterial energy itself of each field, as well as the muscle required by the artist to physically handle and manipulate the materials. 

The depth created is also, in part, due to the predetermined clarity of color. Hardly ever in these paintings is there muddying despite the elaborate entanglement and overlap. Nathanson’s distinct style of color mixing yields results such as in Sparkshift, where an overlay of Baldwin apple red and powder blue does not produce purple, but instead each color remains true to itself, fulfilling the tall order of being two things at once. This technique recalls Walter Benjamin’s fragment “A Child’s View of Color,” translated by Rodney Livingstone, wherein he writes, “Color is single, not as a lifeless thing and a rigid individuality but as a winged creature that flits from one form to the next.” What is the putty pink on the right side of the panel if not a pure mood? Color in Nathanson’s work, animate, playful, pure, is described well by this Benjamin text. 

One of several paintings whose phrase-titles fall within the realm of magic is Elixir, which blends something like a magnetic binary composition with one blue tail crossing the center near the bottom. A potion of improbability and convergence, symmetry despite asymmetry, the planes in this painting stretch beyond the viewer’s belief. rising to an exercise in spirit. 

As a series, these works play with doubling. Trickster color combinations improbably defy form similarity among like-forms. Elixir and Sway Chorus, Light Wrestle and Sparkshift, & Going Goya and Harp are among these form-doubles. Unexpectedly, the expert color manipulation by the artist increases visible relationality between palettes rather than forms, forcing kinship between, for example, the cool palettes of Only a Friend and Getting Light.  

Getting Light is more reminiscent of earlier Nathanson works such as those shown at MOCA Jacksonville in 2016: kaleidoscopic, radial, and gathered in a single, sometimes centered, origin point. The language of graphs is handily applied to this work as each panel undulates and crests according to its respective lightwaves. Tan Transpose, citrusy and dappled, mathematical in title and form, shades in the gaps between two plotted lines on a Y-axis. The “sine” curves here, and in many of the compositions shown, distinguish this series, mapping a rate of color and, ultimately, gaining momentum.  

In one interview, Nathanson refers to her practice as “pseudo-spontaneous,” as she realizes and tapes off the shape of each color before it is poured, then waits a full day for each color to dry. The gradual and rewarding viewing experience of the paintings is owed to this process, sloping and seeping at its own willful, radiant pace. WM

A veteran of more than 20 solo exhibitions in New York since her 1982 debut, and nearly 30 group shows since 1980 from Massachusetts to Florida, Jill Nathanson is entitled to be counted as a heavyweight in the art scene. Ironic, therefore, that her latest show is so striking for its light, airy, almost translucent qualities, its diaphanous veils of color rooted in both science and imagination.

She learned the ABC’s of color from Kenneth Noland and Larry Poons on an informal basis in the late 1970s and early 1980s when an undergraduate at Bennington College, Vermont. Neither of these painters was on the faculty, however, and Nathanson once told me that many and maybe most of her fellow Bennington art students were making paintings that looked more like Helen Frankenthaler – Bennington’s most famous alumna – with whom Nathanson wanted her paintings to have nothing to do. And although there may be some remote similarities, the glossier-looking finish of Nathanson’s paintings and the distinctive shapes in them have long stamped them with an artistic personality entirely her own.

Nathanson’s technique differs from those used by color-field painters in the 1960s, though it employs “modelli” (preparatory studies) and in this somewhat resembles the “modelli” that Friedel Dzubas employed in the later 1970s and ‘80s. But Dzubas didn’t invent modelli. Their use goes back to the Renaissance, if not earlier. And the materials that Nathanson employs are right up to the minute – as is her abstract idiom.

“Jill Nathanson: Light Phrase,” at Berry Campbell Gallery, New York (through February 6): Anyone who has ever mixed colorful paints will notice that the results are not brighter colors but duller murkiness. That’s color theory 101. In her alchemical experiments with pigments and polymers, Jill Nathanson looks for ways to prove color theory wrong. Through abstractions created of translucent layers of acrylic, polymers, and oil, which she pours onto panels, Nathanson brings out the light of her color-filled combinations. In “Light Phrase,” her latest exhibition at Berry Campbell Gallery, in Chelsea, Nathanson looks to enlarge and refine her fluid forms. The artist Christina Kee provides an essay for the online catalogue that further explains Nathanson’s unusual process. —JP

Jill Nathanson, Light's Cover, 2019, acrylic and polymers with oil on panel, 38 1/4 x 74 inches

Jill Nathanson: Light Phrase
Thu, Jan 07, 2021 - Sat, Feb 06, 2021

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In this video, Jill Nathanson gives a tour of her studio in Hoboken, New Jersey, featuring some of her paintings in progress.

Artist's Choice: Interconnected
May 7 - June 7, 2020
View Exhibition

Berry Campbell is pleased to announce Artist’s Choice: Interconnected, an exclusive online exhibition of works from gallery’s inventory chosen by Berry Campbell’s represented contemporary artists. Eric Dever, Judith Godwin, Ken Greenleaf, Jill Nathanson, Ann Purcell, Mike Solomon, Susan Vecsey, James Walsh, Joyce Weinstein, and Frank Wimberley have thoughtfully selected one work from our gallery inventory that they associate with their own creative process and artistic journey. This artist-curated exhibition is an inquiry into the lines of influence and connections within our Berry Campbell artist community. Artist’s Choice: Interconnected launches digitally May 7, 2020.

The choices are sometimes expected, and at other times, surprising.  Some artists were inspired by a painting from an artist they had never met, and others paid tribute to old friends or mentors.  Judith Godwin recalls good times with her old friend and art dealer, Betty Parsons.  James Walsh remembers a painting by Walter Darby Bannard from a 1981 show at Knoedler Gallery.  Mike Solomon pays homage to the perseverance of abstract painter and dear friend, Frank Wimberley saying: “The quiet intermingling of his experience, with the purity of painting, gives his abstractions an authenticity and delicacy that is profound to witness.”  Ken Greenleaf favorite is Cloistered #5 (1968) by Ida Kohlmeyer, delighting in the pure abstraction.  Jill Nathanson picked a color-field forerunner, Dan Christensen.  Ann Purcell admitted to being picky but found true inspiration after visiting our Yvonne Thomas show repeatedly.  Eric Dever ruminates about Charlotte Park: “Like a favorite poem, novel or even film, a painting can be a touchstone, something one returns to with certain regularity; perhaps a gauge of some kind, beginning with personal happiness on the occasion of discovery and new revelation as our lives unfold.”  Joyce Weinstein finds parallels with John Opper.  Susan Vecsey loves the “stillness and movement” of Elaine de Kooning’s Six Horses, Blue Wall (1987).  No coincidence that Vecsey lives down the road from the Elaine de Kooning house in the Hamptons. Frank Wimberley recalls of Herman Cherry: “He was one of the East End artists who wished to me to succeed.”

ABOUT BERRY CAMPBELL
Christine Berry and Martha Campbell have many parallels in their backgrounds and interests. Both studied art history in college, began their careers in the museum world, and later worked together at a major gallery in midtown Manhattan. Most importantly, however, Berry and Campbell share a curatorial vision.

Both art dealers developed a strong emphasis on research and networking with artists and scholars during their art world years. They decided to work together, opening Berry Campbell Gallery in 2013 in the heart of New York's Chelsea art district, at 530 West 24th Street on the ground floor. In 2015, the gallery expanded, doubling its size with an additional 2,000 square feet of exhibition space.

Highlighting a selection of postwar and contemporary artists, the gallery fulfills an important gap in the art world, revealing a depth within American modernism that is just beginning to be understood, encompassing the many artists who were left behind due to race, gender, or geography-beyond such legendary figures as Pollock and de Kooning. Since its inception, the gallery has been especially instrumental in giving women artists long overdue consideration, an effort that museums have only just begun to take up, such as in the 2016 traveling exhibition, Women of Abstract Expressionism, curated by University of Denver professor Gwen F. Chanzit. This show featured work by Perle Fine and Judith Godwin, both represented by Berry Campbell, along with that of Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, and Joan Mitchell. In 2019, Berry Campbell's exhibition, Yvonne Thomas: Windows and Variations (Paintings 1963 - 1965) was reviewed by Roberta Smith for the New York Times, in which Smith wrote that Thomas, "... kept her hand in, adding a fresh directness of touch, and the results give her a place in the still-emerging saga of postwar American abstraction.”

In addition to Perle Fine and Judith Godwin, artists whose work is represented by the gallery include Edward Avedisian, Walter Darby Bannard, Stanley Boxer, Dan Christensen, Eric Dever, John Goodyear, Ken Greenleaf, Raymond Hendler, Ida Kohlmeyer, Jill Nathanson, John Opper, Stephen Pace, Charlotte Park, William Perehudoff, Ann Purcell, Mike Solomon, Syd Solomon, Albert Stadler, Yvonne Thomas, Susan Vecsey, James Walsh, Joyce Weinstein, Frank Wimberley, Larry Zox, and Edward Zutrau. The gallery has helped promote many of these artists' careers in museum shows including that of Bannard at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (2018-19); Syd Solomon, in a traveling museum show which culminates at the John and Mable Ringling Museum in Sarasota and has been extended through 2021; Stephen Pace at The McCutchan Art Center/Pace Galleries at the University of Southern Indiana (2018) and at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum (2019); and Vecsey and Mike Solomon at the Greenville County Museum of Art, South Carolina (2017 and 2019, respectively); and Eric Dever at the Suffolk Community College, Riverhead, New York (2020). In an April 3, 2020 New York Times review of Berry Campbell's exhibition of Ida Kohlmeyer's Cloistered paintings, Roberta Smith stated: “These paintings stunningly sum up a moment when Minimalism was giving way to or being complicated by something more emotionally challenging and implicitly feminine and feminist. They could hang in any museum.”

Collaboration is an important aspect of the gallery. With the widened inquiries and understandings that have resulted from their ongoing discussions about the art world canon, the dealers feel a continual sense of excitement in the discoveries of artists and research still to be made.

Berry Campbell is located in the heart of the Chelsea Arts District at 530 West 24th Street, Ground Floor, New York, NY 10011.  For further information, contact us at 212.924.2178, info@berrycampbell.com or www.berrycampbell.com.

Berry Campbell Celebrates Women's History Month

Ida Kohlmeyer
VIDEO: Virtual Exhibition Walkthrough

Women of Abstract Expressionism 
Inventory Highlights
View Exhibition

Ann Purcell
Upcoming Exhibition: Kali Poems
View Works by Ann Purcell

Judith Godwin
Forbes Magazine: Add to Your list of '5 Women Artists' at These Museums Around The United States
by Chadd Scott

Charlotte Park
Client Testimonial: 
"Extremely gratifying to see Paul Kasmin Gallery's eye-opening summer show, Painters of the East End reviewed by Erin Kimmel in this month's Art in America . And smiled extra wide that AbEx talent Charlotte Park is written up in the same paragraph as — and holds her own with— Joan Mitchell. 'Park's virtuosic oil and crayon compositions (ca. 1965 and 1967) feature dendrite-like configurations in a palette of bright pinks, yellows and blues that appear frozen mid twist.' Ten years ago Christine Berry, owner of one of the most engaging and provocative galleries in Chelsea, Berry Campbell, thankfully introduced me to the work of Charlotte Park, who died in 2010 at age 92 in Montauk, where she lived and painted. She was the wife of artist James Brooks, supporting his career at the expense of her own, and dear friends and neighbors of Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner." 
-Adam Beckerman
View Works by Charlotte Park 

Yvonne Thomas
Eazel Interactive Exhibition | Yvonne Thomas: Windows and Variations (1963-1965) 

Susan Vecsey
blue. 
Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn Harbor, New York
View Works by Susan Vecsey

Jill Nathanson
LINEA: Studio Notes from the Art Students League of New York
Artist Snapshot: Jill Nathanson 

Perle Fine
What We See, How We See
Through April 2021
Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, New York
View Works by Perle Fine

Joyce Weinstein
Postwar Women
Curated by William Corwin
The Art Students League, New York
View Works by Joyce Weinstein

Artist Snapshot: Jill Nathanson
Exploring the mind and habits of an artist in twenty-five questions

At what age did you decide to become an artist?
When I was a tiny girl I loved horses, pretending I was a horse and also drawing horses. When I first started kindergarten, my horse drawing skill was rewarded: I was honored with the position of glue monitor. I had heard of horses being killed and sent to the glue factory, so I was nervous about a possible connection. I thought of myself as an artist in some way from that early time.

How did your parents react when you told them you anted to become an artist?
My mother was enthusiastic. She was a classical pianist with the highest level of training but a truncated career. She liked the idea of me being an artist even if she didn’t have a clear sense of what that might really mean, and I guess my father didn’t think much about his little girl’s future in terms of career in any case. From my earliest days I heard my mother practicing the classical repertoire without explanations, so I assumed she was making up the music as she went along — creating the great piano works of Chopin, Beethoven, Schumann. Why did she make the song go in that way. Why did the nice calm part become the loud stormy part? When I was a teen, my mother wanted me to go to Bennington College because that was where Helen Frankenthaler, a famous woman artist, had gone. So I went to Bennington early, after my junior year at the High School of Music and Art (now known as LaGuardia High School), thinking of myself as a professional from the start, knowing next to nothing. Bennington College, a key site of American modernism in the 1970s, was very good for me.

In Conversation: Jill Nathanson talks with A.V. Ryan about her solo exhibition,
Cadence

Directed by Andrew Gurian

Talk of “purity” is usually best resisted in relation to works of visual art. What sort of uninflected content or form can really ever be referred to by it, after all? Jill Nathanson’s structured pourings of clear and vivid color, however, suggest the creator’s affinity with the powers of her painted medium in their most abstract sense. Beyond the transparency of the paint itself, which leads the viewer into impressions of these paintings as something aquatically pristine, there is an overall attitude of clarity and resolution in these strong and searching works. In contrast to much contemporary abstraction, Nathanson’s paintings have more to do with elucidation than complication, and seem distilled from deeply thought-through relationships of light, space, color and gravity.

Empirical Empyrean (2017), the title of one of Jill Nathanson's fifteen abstract paintings in "Cadence" at Berry Campbell, says it all. Each painting is built out of discrete, translucent color areas that thicken where they overlap. As they coalesce into fields, juxtapositions of hue prompt the eye to unify the compositions. The color transcends local incident, while the translucency generates an overall glow.

At Berry Campbell in Chelsea, we have “Jill Nathanson: Cadence” (through June 30). This lovely show, of 17 shimmering veils of color, picks up where the artist’s notable last show left off, and carries the unique presence she has established on to new triumphs.

Today, we’re meeting Jill Nathanson, a contemporary painter whose work feels summery and uplifting, and stands out from your typical pretty abstracts. Her solo show at a New York gallery just opened, so find out what you need to know about the hows and whys of her work.

An artist who belongs to the Color Field legacy, according to the gallery, Jill Nathanson is a painter who goes beyond that tradition to reduce painting to its physical essence. At Berry Campbell, Nathanson will present 19 recent works, including important large-scale paintings.

Thanks to interior designer Katherine Hammond and architects CWB Architects for including Jill Nathanson’s painting “Untouchable Day” in their transformative renovation of a Brooklyn Townhouse.

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