BY ANGELA LEVINE
THE JERUSALEM POST
MAY 26, 2000
Landscape painters newly arrived in this country are faced with a double challenge: how to deal with a glaring light which bleaches colors, blurs contours, and throws up strong black-and-white contrasts; and how, sidestepping the merely picturesque, to render a countryside rich in biblical and symbolic associations already immortalized – or banalized – by scores of artists, past and present.
After many previous visits to this country, this challenge was recently taken up by Anne Peretz, an American artist who divides her time between Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Truro, Cape Cod, and who shows regularly at New York’s Salander-O’Reilly Gallery.
The results of this confrontation are now on display in the Jaffa gallery from whose rooftop Peretz painted traditional scenes of white buildings set against sea and sky. However, her main offering is a set of large panoramic views of the hills ringing Jerusalem.
These well constructed compositions, apparently based on Cezanne’s “rules” for achieving balance and harmony, reach their peak in Peretz’s monumental painting of the abandoned village of Lifta, where snaking paths encircle clumps of primitive stone dwellings and the hillside seems to—
From a catalog available in the gallery, one notes that Peretz employed an abundance of gray-greens and cobalt-blues for her paintings of Cape Cod ponds and dunes in different seasons and weathers. The palette she has adopted for her Jerusalem landscapes is strikingly different. To obtain the washed-out appearance of the scenery and the extreme paleness of the stony terrain, she has employed copious amounts of white paint, either in an almost unadulterated state or added lavishly to ochres and burnt umbers.
Although these paintings are worked up from photographs and/or small outdoor studies (also on view), facile representation of the landscape is avoided by a generally successful combination of realistic detail and both impressionist and expressive passages of painting. Interest is also held by varied paintwork (brush, knife and drippings) and by textural variations achieved on occasion by mixing sand into the oils.
The best of these landscapes project a sense of loneliness and desolation. Considered within the context of the history of local landscape painting (from the drawings of Anna Ticho and Leopold Krakauer to the Jerusalem landscapes of Avigdor Arikha) all this is nothing new. But for a visiting artist accustomed to depicting skies and landscapes gentler and less demanding than our own, it ranks as a real achievement. (Horace Richter Gallery, Jaffa) Till June 8.
