Ethel Gittlin

Ethel Gittlin				Main Gallery, Gallery II			October 6 - October 31, 2007

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	Ethel Gittlin - Lifting The Veil Ethel Gittlin’s landscapes spring from an intensely romantic sensibility. What fascinates her and moves her is the landscape of the Mediterranean, and, in particular, the relationship between the land and the sea. It is noticeable that visitors from northern lands who come to the shores of the Mediterranean to paint have a different relationship to what they see than those who were actually born there. One early manifestation of this was the so-called ‘Volcano School’ of painters who worked in and around Naples during the 18th century. The paintings they produced are regarded by art historians as one of the first manifestations in the visual arts of the Romantic Movement. In fact, the depiction of landscape was one of the primary vehicles through which a new kind of attitude to the external universe started to express itself. The romantic painters, like the romantic poets who were their contemporaries felt an empathy with nature that transcended the barriers between man and the world he inhabited in a way that had not happened previously in European art and literature, though there is a case for saying that empathetic sensations of this type had long manifested themselves in Chinese painting and poetry. It was Shelley who said: “Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.” Essentially what this posits is a fusion between the inner and the outer, between the observer and what is observed. We can see this process at work in art as well as in literature – Gittlin’s paintings have landscape as their declared subject, but really what they try to capture is not so much a place, as the sense of revelation engendered by an encounter with that place. One telling sign of this is her treatment of the sea. In nearly all of these compositions the sea appears through a screen of vegetation. It functions as a kind of unattainable ‘beyond’ – visible, but never quite attainable. Gittlin has a liking for conditions of light that reinforce this feeling – her skies, for example, are the skies of evening or early morning She also likes the way in which trees and bushes silhouette themselves against sky and sea, and is willing to sacrifice detail to produced this effect. Her landscapes are almost invariably lit with light that comes towards the spectator, rather than from behind him or her. Essentially this is landscape painting that is moving towards the condition of abstract art, while holding back from taking the final step into pure abstraction. This reason for this is that abstract painting – painting related to Abstract Expressionism – is necessarily something that aims to conjure up a condition of being, but which at the same time tells us that this condition is autonomous. It is clear that Ethel Gittlin does not agree with this proposition. For her it is the beauty and wonder of the natural world that sustain the dream, which cannot exist without this external support.