Blue Fireflies
Acrylic on Canvas
36” x 18”
Often taking water for her subject-matter, Leni Berliner transposes the restlessness and dynamism of bodies of water into something as mysteriously still as the photograph of a forest. In fact, the expansiveness that bodies of water share with forested landscapes permeates her paintings.
Berliner prefers prefers working in acrylic, and likes to draw from the immediacy of gesture and contours that develop as she sketches out a scene onto canvas. While she is not opposed to utilizing the perspectives found in photographs of landscapes to round off a painting, she is nevertheless quick to capture what she identifies as “the energy of a place.”
When this place is a National Park, Berliner communicates the singular experience of being in a natural setting that is nonetheless bounded and administered by the bureaucracy of human intervention. Taking great care to reproduce the artificial line separating natural structures from human constructions, she sublimates the Romanticism of encountering nature into uncannily placid representations of forest and shore, which feel equally intimate and elusive.