Brenda Horowitz

"Brenda Horowitz presents the familiar environment in astonishing freshness, vibrating with bold energy and intense pigment, vivid and expressive, the view pared down to essential elements – color, line and form. She distills color to such concentration, such a saturation, that one can almost hear it. Her compositions, simplified to land, water, sky, sometimes a house, explore the inherent character of the Cape landscape, where the quality of light reflected by the ocean intensifies the color of nature. "I always loved landscapes," Horowitz says, "from the age of 14, I was painting landscapes."

Beach Point, 2008, Acrylic on canvas, 36 x 36" Click to tour Horowitz's work

Brenda Horowitz has been with Berta Walker Gallery since it opened fifteen years ago and has been painting in Provincetown since her student days with Hans Hofmann.

Her landscapes of the Outer Cape evoke, as Boston Globe art critic
Cate McQuaid has observed, "more of a dream of summer than summer itself." Her gift is to be able to transform a wonderful view of land, sky, water - and an occasional brilliant white house - into powerful, expressionistic summer symphonies through Fauve-like color and simplified form that are simultaneously intense and lyrically still. Like an accomplished jazz musician, Horowitz' masterful color improvisation (red and magenta skies, lavendar shrubs) reflects both her complete command of color (perhaps awakened in her years of study with color master Hans Hofmann) and her intense connection to the Cape she knows so well, "I've been painting landscapes since I was fourteen (over fifty years)".

Building on the tradition of some of the greatest America modernists (Milton Avery has come to critics' minds and Rothko's later color field work), Horowitz is a jazz master and proves it over and over again in these color symphonies that bespeak Summer on the Cape. Horowitz's acrylic and gouache paintings on canvas remind the viewer of what is fundamental to art that transcends the mere rendering of a pretty scene: they speak to us with power, majesty, and offer us something to think about or feel.