Excerpt from Jill Nathanson: Light Music
By David Rhodes
Always an artist involved with abstraction in painting, Jill Nathanson quickly oriented herself during a period of extraordinary difficulty for those choosing to pursue this direction. During the 1970s and 1980s artists in New York experimented with formal and material ways to continue painting after it was declared “dead.” Among the artists seeking to continue with painting, several have been of particular importance to Nathanson: Thomas Nozkowski, Harriet Korman, and Louise Fishman, all of whom pursed individual paths. Of these artists, Korman, still remains a colleague and a friend. Interestingly, Nathanson can be seen as an artist that continued with some aspects of Color Field painting whilst assertively developing her own way of making a painting. Today she pours paint to find forms—we can think of both Morris Louis and Lynda Benglis—and uses a collaged element in her preparation, that was previously her finished painting, recalling Al Loving’s collaged/assembled work. Yet, a crucial factor in appreciating Nathanson’s achievement is not only to consider the way Nathanson’s paintings are made technically, but in the way her process does not leave pictoriality behind and does not dismiss the relationality of part to whole for this, and because of this, the direct line through the history of painting is maintained....
