Bee 1999

Jennifer Bartlett has made this painting, Bee, with dense greens and yellows, a world humming with life. Look at these marks! It feels like Bartlett is working in a garden and tending a patch of green, making small hatch marks with the brush, little stabs of paint to build up layer upon layer. You can almost feel her switching between different greens, that nervous yellow line buzzing over the top. There’s a lot of movement in the painting, it’s not still, but the kind of movement a garden has, busy with the wind, and the constant change of light. I wonder if Bartlett was outside when she made it? Or maybe she was remembering a place, filtering it through her mind and onto the canvas? The painting feels both abstract and like a landscape at the same time, pushing between those two worlds. That kind of push-and-pull can be interesting, and can open up new ways of seeing. It reminds me of the kind of work Lois Dodd was doing, noticing the everyday and making us see it in new ways. I think that is where paintings can bring us something special: seeing old things in new ways, making us feel alive to the world.