Continuing through November 30, 2011
Candice Eisenfeld calls it a “personal archeology of endurance” that informs her solo exhibition of 10 paintings titled “Learning to Fly: Wise Women Learn from Birds.” Whatever the personal impetus that shifted Eisenfeld’s oeuvre from landscapes to avian imagery, the outcome is a serene message of grace, persistence, community and life’s fragility. Particularly striking are the acrylic-on-panel works in which the central image is a wash of light, evocative of a waterfall, harboring birds in various stages of flight. In “Lessons in Mid-Air” and “Passage Through Phthalo Forest” the acrobatic birds feel anthropomorphized, as if we are meant to gather inspiration from their freedom of flight.
Other paintings, such as “In Between Gold,” feature a floating nest image that is delicately rendered with thin brushstrokes. One of her trademarks is the gauzy, ethereal background created by pouring paint on birch boards, which she continually sands and layers, moving the paint with rags and brushes, in the end eliciting landscapes. Wth these new paintings Eisenfeld has added the fresh measure of detailed objects, revealing an artist who, to borrow from the images, has spread her wings.