Amy Bennett's new paintings of lake scenes combine her dual concerns of landscape and narrative into entrancing individual images. While some of her past series have focused on drama around neighborhoods and snow scenes, this series explores the reflectivity of water and the extensive spectrum of olive that trees around a lake display. While a lot of contemporary oil painting flaunts the physicality of the medium, Bennett's oil on wood panel images are instead uniformly flat, with any remnants of individual brushstrokes exquisitely surrendered to the picture as a whole. Coating each painting with rosin amplifies the richness of the colors she uses: they literally shine. The sheen from the rosin also harmonizes the layers of landscape iconography she is composing with, like the shadows in between trees as they reflect off of the rippling water.

Her technical virtuosity with paint is instantly recognizable, but an invitation for long contemplation emerges from the ambiguity of the actions within each image. Search Party, features a gathering of men and women around a table in front of one lakeside house, while in front of the neighboring house a woman in a burgundy dress is knee-deep and wading out into the water. Another woman next to a dog at the shore's edge has her arms up by her head as if she is calling out. It is a beautiful image, made more absorbing through the absence of specific details about the unfolding drama. (It would be more intriguing still if the title did not point the viewer into a set of associations; luckily, that’s a practice she avoids in most of the other pieces in this show.) In Paula, a woman stands on her shoreline dock and looks straight out at the viewer, and a floating dock in the foreground with a dog on it. While attempting to reconstruct a workable narrative is certainly one option when looking at an image like this, the stillness of the water and the centeredness of the image can also inspire the kind of fraught meditation on circumstances that de Chirico's cityscapes or Balthus’ interiors are known for.

"Search Party" 2008 Amy Bennett Oil on panel, 18" x 24"
Photo: courtesy of Richard Heller Gallery