A New Way of Seeing

Jacqueline Cotter's vision has never been sharper.

by Bruce Walsh

Treading Water

[ visual art ]

Now in her late 80s, abstract expressionist painter Jacqueline Cotter is losing her sight rapidly. She gently requests that guests avoid sitting in front of the window on sunny days, as the light obscures the human form and makes conversation physically difficult.

"I haven't come to terms with it yet," she says, standing in her apartment, surrounded by decades of paintings — her own and those of other well-known contemporaries. "I'm mad. I'm not sorry for myself. I mean, I'm 89 years old, so you have to have some [loss], but why does it have to be my eyes?"

Speaking from his eponymous Old City gallery, Richard Rosenfeld says Cotter's latest series, "New Work" — all created after her sight began to deteriorate — is her finest, full of the artist's most distinct paintings to date. "Her shapes used to be more important. Now the edges are blurred," he explains. "She's relying more on the actual color and the way the paint goes on the canvas. It gives them a unity and a feeling of suffuse light that is even greater than before."

When told of Rosenfeld's analysis, Cotter is reluctant to discuss the matter further. "Hmm. That's interesting." She pauses. "Simplification," she finally offers, and that's all that needs to be said.

(CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Cotter's career began in 1970 after she finished raising four children. She says she could never pursue art as a hobby; she knew it would take over, and she feared her family would suffer. "It would have been impossible," she says of her parenting decades. "I know people can do it now, but things are better for women now."

Above her refrigerator rests a representational landscape of a Pennsylvania country cottage, painted sometime in the '70s. You have to stretch on tiptoe to see it, as if Cotter were trying to conceal it from view. It's simply unthinkable to imagine that this piece was created by the same person whose abstractions adorn the adjacent studio.

"When I went back to painting, I just picked up where I left off: figure painting, landscape painting," she says. "Gradually, I started sliding into abstraction. It doesn't happen overnight. You have to earn it. It's seeing a whole new way."

By the early '80s, she could taste the beginnings of that new vision — a simpler, more direct form of expression.

The missing link — Franklin Town, a landscape from 1982 — hangs in her bedroom. The particular arc and crest of the skyline viscerally connects with lifelong Philadelphians, but one senses the artist is more concerned with color and composition than in subject matter.

About a decade later, Cotter brought her work to Rosenfeld, after years of shows at the more conservative Hahn Gallery. "It was an instant decision," says Rosenfeld. "A no-brainer, as they say. ... She's always trying to get deeper into her own aesthetic. She's come up with something very personal, very deeply felt, and not all artists get to that point."

In "New Works," Cotter continues to use her favorite mediums: acrylic, canvas and Mylar. Gone are the hard boundaries to the colors and shapes. Gone, too, are the handwritten letters found in previous works. She's seeing a whole new way. Simpler. And, at this point, it's at least in part out of necessity. Cotter sees less but, as it turns out, she also sees more.

"What else would I do?" she says, when asked why she continues to paint many hours each day. But then she thinks for a moment and corrects herself. "No. It isn't even that. It's just ... you never get there. It's the carrot on the stick."

(b_walsh@citypaper.net)

"New Works" opening reception, Sun., May 16, noon-5 p.m., free, through June 6, Rosenfeld Gallery, 113 Arch St., 215-922-1376, therosenfeldgallery.com.