Excerpt from Jill Nathanson: Color, Light, and Pictorial Forces
By Karen Wilkin
That Nathanson is a remarkable, highly individual colorist is not news. I’ve been aware of this aspect of her abilities ever since I first encountered her and her work at the inaugural session of the still-flourishing Triangle Artists Workshop, an international program for painters and sculptors founded by the British sculptor Anthony Caro, in the summer of 1982. Nathanson, a participating artist in the workshop, was only six years out of Bennington College; I, a visiting critic, was a rookie curator. That initial meeting in the workplace was the start of an enduring studio relationship and a warm friendship. The most memorable thing about Nathanson’s work, even then, was its wholly original orchestration of color. With the clear vision of hindsight, it’s even possible to see the simplified compositions of the paintings she did at Triangle as pointing to her mature work, but at the time, they were simply an early stage of what would be years of investigation of structural possibilities and the properties of materials, in the service of resonance and expression. Nathanson’s teachers from the Bennington years, Sophia Healy, Kenneth Noland, and Larry Poons, were painters associated with Color Field abstraction, part of the generation that rejected the anxiety-laden, contingent approach of gestural Abstract Expressionism in favor of “cool” investigations of the ability of chromatic relationships to encapsulate and trigger emotion and associations. Nathanson characterizes these early mentors as thinking of color “as energy, as life energy, and I maintained this general view.” She has aspired (and I believe that she has succeeded admirably) to move the generating precepts of Color Field abstraction into the present. She has done this not by repeating the approaches of her former teachers (although she understands those approaches deeply) but in a new way, bound up with her own sensibilities, shaped equally by her own experience and the capabilities of contemporary materials.
