August 3 & 10, 2020 Issue

The most meaningful artistic credo I’ve ever read is John Updike’s “My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me – to give the mundane its beautiful due” (Foreword to his The Early Stories 1953 – 1975). I thought of Updike’s statement when I saw Serena Stevens’ “Rocking Chair” in this week’s issue. What a gorgeous painting! It illustrates Andrea K. Scott’s “At the Galleries.” Scott writes,

The young realist painter—who recently returned to her native Iowa after chasing the light in California, New Mexico, and Rhode Island—is at her best in scenes of domestic interiors, watchfully rendered rooms that convey the contradictions of home and the tension between melancholy and intimacy (as seen in “Rocking Chair,” above).

 

I relish the way “Rocking Chair” ’s vertical perspective includes the light-soaked brown chair and the intricate geometry of its gray shadow. Its rendition of light seems to me both painterly and photographic. I love it.

Serena Stevens, Rocking Chair (2020)