RONA LEE COHEN

Mitchell•Giddings Fine Arts is pleased to introduce Rona Lee Cohen to our collection. Working with oil on paper, Cohen explores relationships between everyday objects which happen to—momentarily—reside on a small table; often, hanging portraits or perhaps a colorful rug share her intimate interiors. As she groups her incidental artifacts and introduces patches of color, she is sliding into an artist’s mystical world of trepidation and opportunity. Cohen says, “I find, unfind, refine, unrefine. It’s an unpredictable, unsteady process. There is a place where the seen touches the unseen and unravels a bit, moving in and out of something sensible.” From Cohen’s arrangements emerge shimmering tableaux where household items dissolve into glorious passages of paint.

Cohen possesses an unusual painting instinct, with an astonishing eye for subtle tonal shifts and design and a deep and obvious love of the emotive power of a simple, unassuming beauty. She is a rare artist who responds to our abrasive, kinetic world with simplicity and humor. Paradoxically, as she negotiates the “unpredictable, unsteady process,” her searching brushstrokes and harmonies are reborn into little worlds in which she is able to assimilate her varied and familiar objects into paintings of particular completeness and quiet.

Petria Mitchell and Jim Giddings
Co-directors, MGFA

May 1, 2022

Welcome to this collection of interiors and small works. These paintings have been gathered to be lingered over, and to be experienced singly or together, as choristers might be. While their titles may call attention to everyday furnishings and objects, or suggest conceptual subjects, the paintings themselves do little to forefront these elements, minimizing visual hierarchy and embedding everything in a common ground of abundant color and potent stillness. As a result, we feel invited to look and see for ourselves, and with just a few clues, to embark on a kind of visual foraging led by our innate curiosity. We might begin by looking for the “flute” or “pry bar,” or we might ask “what is that patch of blue?” or “where is the aloe plant?” Instead of finding the answers, our eyes are drawn into each painting to wander and poke around; as they do, we experience, whether we recognize it or not, the flashes of our own seeing, freed from the guiding hand of more typical picture and perspective making.  

These paintings are of course reflections of the very particular subjects and places which prompt them, and of their painter and her moods and gaze; many of the titular objects and notions can indeed be found. Yet, each touch of the brush, each hinted-at object or space, is unencumbered by any sense of a fixed objective, leaving viewers free to encounter and (ideally) trust their own reactions. These paintings lack conventional two or three dimensionality: we don’t experience them as flat and impenetrable, nor do we quite imagine reaching through the surface and waving our hands about in their air.  Perhaps this is why they feel so alert, and yet so unimposing. They hang before us as offerings, releasing us from the soft censorship of instruction as to how they should be seen. Born out of solitude, and an unassuming and inspired constancy, these paintings embody a spirit of informed freedom to which we all likely aspire. 

April 14, 2022