Carol Lefkowitz's abstract oils on canvas or paper may be untitled (e.g., "Untitled #141," "Untitled $144," "Untitled #146"), but viewers perusing her arrays of pastel-like "smudges" or lozenges in aqua, lemon yellow, lime green and burnt orange will undoubtedly think of summer afternoon idylls, with sky and foliage reflected on shimmering, metallic water surfaces: Of Monet or even Rothko, multiplied.
The artist: "I have been caught for the past many years in the progression of a body of work. On the surface it began as a series of fish in water ... The [now completely abstract] paintings are about ... what is hauled up [during the painting] process - transparency, opacity, rhythm, stillness, pattern, light, randomness, depth, flatness, immersion, and submersion ... I troll for the common language within the worlds of images and abstraction."
To that sustained aquatic metaphor we can perhaps add an optical/cinematic one: The blurred oblongs suggest film sprocket holes, and the vertical rivulets of fluid, thinned paint that flows down over the blurred color patches suggest water-streaked panes of glass. It's all about perception and memory as well as the process, since Lefkowitz works from an internal model - unlike Monet, but like Rothko.
