“Summer Ponds – Betsy DeFusco’s New Work” at the Ohio State Faculty Club

How beautiful to have a backyard pond like Betsy Furlong DeFusco has, with time to contemplate her inspiration on canvas, in color. “It's very relaxing to sit and watch the fish swim endlessly in a swirl of colors, and I soon became involved in seeing a whole world of activity in one small body of water. I am constantly inspired by the different worlds of nature and the act of painting itself as I explore the border between abstraction and representation,” she tells us in the statement she prepared for her major exhibition, which is at the Ohio State University Faculty Club until October 28 .

Betsy De Fusco, Snake Sushi 2. Oil on wood panel, 9 x 12.” (Leafy vines decorate the fish shapes like strings of holiday lights strung from the balcony of a seaside resort.)

While DeFusco's work begins with observation, his interest in invented color moves the paintings toward abstraction, as does his simplification of forms and his evident interest in the decorative. This show is really delicious. It's restful, peaceful, seductive. The floating forms of water lilies with goldfish idling among them are as calming painted in intense pastels as their real – and less vivid – originals. Its strong colors, softened by applied layers of transparent glazes, read from a distance as watercolor rather than oil because they are transparent and give the illusion of translucent overlap. Seasnake Sushi 2 It's a work like that, an expression of exuberance created by color, shape, line and the artist's ability to use them as she wishes.

Betsy De Fusco, Floating colors 2. oil on wood panel, 16-3/4 x 21-3/4.”

Any painter who chooses water lilies and a pastel palette to work with will be compared to Monet; DeFusco is open to this comparison, with her lush colors and dreamy, floating forms. It's good to remember, though, that Monet's mission was entirely different: he was a student of light, intent on making reality in a new way, working to represent.


I'm not so sure that's DeFusco's mission, however seductive his palette is. While in Floating colors We can imagine the blue water giving way to green, or the play of shadows on the water having this color effect, the lack of details in the water lilies tells us that the artist does not want to convince us of the nature of what she saw. What she “captured” was a vision, in which a scene of lilies in water served as inspiration for a foray into color, her emotional and imaginative center. Another basic thing to note is DeFusco's impartial brushstroke. Inside Floating colors, as in many of the pieces in this show, the strong back and forth strokes show no impulse to imitate nature. They move across the scene to form a screen and create an impossible simultaneous movement suggested by the cuts in the leaves: some move left, others right, all in the same current. (If you inspect the images on her Facebook page, linked above, you can get a better sense of these surfaces.)

In DeFusco's small scale series royal victory paintings, one of my favorites is Near the Coast.

Betsy De Fusco, Near the coast. Oil on wooden panel, 16-3/4 x 21-3/4.”

The shapes in this work fill the picture plane in more complicated sizes and relationships than in some, suggesting a possible reality for the leaves. At the same time, the edges of the shapes are indistinct and, compared to most of the works in the show, the colors are very muted; I feel like I have to rub something from my eyes to get close enough to the image.


I think DeFusco hit a sweet spot here, somewhere between painting a scene and painting a dream. The strong horizontal brushstrokes that span the surface of the painting once again give a calm dynamic to what appears to be a cold and stable scene.

Betsy De Fusco, Swimming Through. oil on wood panel. 12×12.”

Two more small paintings won my heart, two that look realistic. Swimming through features a chunky, non-abstract goldfish swimming in clear water just below some small lily pads. The water is blue-gray. The plants are green. The fish is gold. All elements are painted with enough detail to convey a sense of their reality.


I like the point of view. I like that we are situated so that we are looking directly at this fish. I can't imagine how I got here – so close and so directly above – without disturbing the quiet calm of the scene. I feel like I'm in a privileged place. It's special, but it's not abstract. What's even more special is that it's obviously fleeting. Although there is a lot of movement implicit in DeFusco's work, this is both one fish and The fish. It is not a mass of moving shapes. We know which way it is going and that it will soon disappear. There is a drama in this fleeting scene that the liveliest, most crowded paintings cannot have.


I also like the soft colors of the painting, especially in contrast to its surroundings. DeFusco loves pinks and bright tropical colors, so her show is a brilliant experience. This one Swimming through it seems that something self-sufficient and happy in its calm literal expression is especially refreshing in context.


Autumn Lagoon share with Swimming through this nod to literal reality. As a result, both paintings move into a contemplative space, a space that the more colorful and abstract paintings do not occupy. The distance between this and Seasnake Sushi 2 It's vast.

Betsy De Fusco, Autumn Lagoon. Oil on wooden panel, 12×12.”

The focus of this painting is very clear; the subject is the yellow lily trailing a disappearing tendril in the lower left corner. There is a distinctly dynamic aspect to the composition. Even though it's not a fast or dynamic image, there's a sense of something to come that adds purpose and story. The yellow shape crosses a bottom line, moving from blue-gray water to water clear enough to reflect the foliage in all its deep, moody true green color. A flat pink sheet of stucco intrudes on the upper edge of DeFusco's abstract, artificial world.


I am happy to accept this embassy from the other side. It's beautiful and reminds me of the tip that DeFusco works on. But that doesn't undo this enchanting moment of reality, when a resting leaf floats between two worlds, serene between the aesthetics of color combinations and the truth of incipient decay.

If DeFusco's program has any major flaw, it's that there's too much work in it. She produced a prodigious body of paintings on a few subjects in a special, cramped pallet. I think she would be better served by holding back a little and whetting her appetite for more. But it is beautiful. For the art lover who watches the leaves change with a sense of regret, this is the spectacle to hold on to the sweetness of warm days and long, slow, contemplative days of ripe beauty.