For Milt Masur, creating colorful bas-relief art works—at once paintings and sculptures—comes from a desire to interpret the world through art. He refers to the book by Cynthia Freeland, But Is It Art? in which one interpretation of art is, “continuing examination of our perceptual awareness and a continuing expansion of our awareness of the world around us.” Masur puts it slightly differently: “Creativity in general and art in particular constantly re-shape our perception of our outer environment as it interacts with our inner selves.” Of the many ways to be creative, visual art has the advantage of uniting these interactions by capturing a meaningful moment in time.

The Brooklyn born, Long Island based artist and still practicing physician thinks that creativity is a physiological part of human nature, and credits his medical experience as one of the shapers of his humanistic ethos. His evocative paintings provide a tension between surface and depth, the tactile and the visual, the durable and the fleeting, perhaps in some way, illustrating our constant search into the exterior and interior world. He applies enamel and oil paints on bas-relief collages to create three-dimensional pictures. There is a sense of colorful, dense excitement in his sweeping, elegant landscapes.

There are broad vistas of mountain ranges, coastal cliffs, desert expanses and serene woodlands rendering eloquent, personalized spaces. Masur captures the sheen of moving water and gently swirling reeds, building the textured surfaces with layer after layer of color. The sculptural and collage elements give palpable interpretations of the subjects he paints and provide a powerful sense of identity; the applied color provides nuance and mood; the combination, sometimes a feeling of wonder. He uses a bold, natural palate rife with brilliant hues.

His style is a hybrid of figurativism and impressionism with an occasional bow to abstraction. His painting can be energetic and enchanting, even mesmerizing, pulling our eyes around the picture plane and into his beautiful world. He feels that the psychologist Erik Erikson and the revolutionary feminist and anti-ageist, Betty Friedan, were correct in viewing generativity versus stagnation as the central issue of life, and he tries to impart this message in his art work.

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