Recent Press

“Lee Cohen: Texas Landscapes” Opens at DesignWorks
Elisabeth Lanier, Islander Magazine, October 2006, pp.24-25

DesignWorks, located in the heart of Galveston’s Arts & entertainment district, presents “Lee Cohen: Texas Landscapes.”  The opening, on Saturday, September 30th, coincides with the Galveston ArtWalk.

Cohen came to painting later in life after an active and successful career as an educator.  In so doing, she realized her dream of becoming a painter.  Ironically, her work reveals that throughout her life, while she was teaching others, she, herself, was learning to see.

Cohen and her husband were living in Israel when she first began making art, where the harsh but beautiful desert landscape caught her painterly eye.  When they returned to the States, it was to Chester County, Pennsylvania, where, once again, it was the landscape of the place that appealed to Cohen.  This landscape, however, was as different from that of Israel as lush and verdant foliage is from weatherworn rocks.  Still, it was landscape and the interpretation of it as a way to establish place and meaning that captured Cohen’s imagination.  Another move, in 2000, brought them to the plains of east Texas, where Cohen found herself captivated by yet another landscape -- one similar to but greatly removed from that of Israel.  It is these paintings, these Texas Landscapes, that are showing at the Gallery at DesignWorks.

Cohen is proficient in several mediums -- oil, watercolor, gouache, acrylic -- and this show includes examples of her capabilities, primarily oil on linen, but also watercolor and gouache.  But, perhaps of more interest than her productivity is Cohen’s very personal and distinctive approach to her subject.

Cohen is seduced by this land. She is besotted by it.  She revels in it, in its forms made manifest by light, in the play of light and shadow, in the vastness of the sky and empty plains, in the angles of its geometry, in the intimacy of blades of grass, of a bundle of tumbleweed.  She is struck by it over and over and over again.  She can’t get enough of it.

Working outside, working from sketches and/or photographs, working from memory, Cohen becomes a mechanic, taking the scene apart, examining all the parts and pieces, before re-assembling them into the finished landscape that then, in turn, seduces us.  The resultant landscape is one that is neither truly representational nor truly abstract, but rather something of a dreamscape that captivates with the impact of its imagery and the emotions that it engenders.

It is in her enthusiasm for the land, in her passion for it, that she helps remind us that it is something of beauty and value to have vistas such as these.  But, her consciousness also reminds us that vistas such as these, of strong rocky outcroppings -- these silent sentinels of the desert -- are actually extremely fragile.

As Cohen herself says, “My aim is to make time stop ¾ for the viewer to share that specific moment in that specific place.”  Could we find a more eloquent reminder of the vulnerability of our natural landscapes?

©2003 Lee Cohen All Rights Reserved