"What´s Old Is New"
Landscapes by Lee Cohen
Review by Elisabeth Guthrie Lanier, Design Works, Galveston, Texas

Lee Cohen´s paintings are about endurance. Primordial rock outcroppings, gnarled tree trunks, ancient sinuous rivers. And the human spirit. Oh yes, the human spirit.

Lee Cohen (College Station, Texas) 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. Upon their return to the United States, they found themselves in the lush and verdant landscape of Chester County, Pennsylvania, before their move to College Station. In the plains of Texas, Cohen was, once again, captivated by yet another landscape - one similar to but greatly removed from that of Israel.

And, it is those paintings, these Texas landscapes, that formed the show, "What´s Old is New," at the Gallery of the Jung Center in Houston from December 1 to December 20, 2007.

Cohen is proficient in several mediums - oil, watercolor, gouache, acrylic - and this show included examples of her many capabilities, primarily oil on linen, but also some watercolor and gouache. Yet her style, monolithic as it is, is essentially one of dissection, making it difficult, at a distance, to determine whether her medium is watercolor or oil.

But, perhaps, of more interest than her productivity is Cohen´s very personal and distinctive approach to her subject. For Cohen is seduced by this land. She revels 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 again. And she has shared that wealth of feeling, of impression, with us, her audience.

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, entices us. The resultant landscape is one that is neither truly representational nor truly abstract, but rather something of a dreamscape that captivates with its imagery and the emotions that it engenders.

And the impact of its imagery is achieved, in part, by Cohen´s repeated use of the monolithic form. Image after towering image is offered - the immense haunch of the rocky peak in West Texas, the moving, up-thrusting mound in Big Bend Castles, and the eloquent column of rock - perhaps a volcanic core - in Around the Bend - all are single, dominant features of Cohen´s landscapes. In her hands, even a river becomes a single unifying force - a volumetric force of nature - as in Looking Down at the Rio Grande.

She mixes scale at will, so that something at once large and powerful becomes, upon inspection, fractured and arcane, and one discovers that she has developed her own language with which she tells her tales. Take for example the stone wall in the foreground of Around the Bend, and the convoluted forms limned by the fall of sunlight on the craggy surface. Or Sedona 1, 2007, a sentinel of stone, a rocky edifice made more abstract by the play of light and the forming of jottings as if from an unknown hand. Again, in Cactus Mountain, we saw these symbols, those strange markings, rise up in the heaving and writhing forms of the living earth. In Early Texas Settlers, an homage not only to those departed human settlers, but to the oak trees that once shaded them and remain still, we once more saw Cohen´s iconography ranging over the twisted trunks and branches.

The abstract forms of her landscapes are rife with glyphs - a shorthand of sorts - that animate the planes of her canvases just as surely as do the pictographs found in the Lascaux caves in southwestern France. And just as pictographs of that other place do, Cohen´s glyphs inform her work with living energy.

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. Her perception reminds us that vistas such as these - of strong rocky outcroppings and ancient gnarled trees - are actually extremely fragile, and are deserving of our own awareness. Her voice, though, speaks to endurance - to the endurance of these monolithic landscapes - and to the endurance of the human spirit.