The Boston Phoenix, February 27, 1998

"Solo flyers/Four artists making it without galleries"

(caption) "Sheltering Sky": the power of this Ann Christensen painting derives from the storm that's looming beyond the frame.

(caption) "Signs of Spirit": here Christensen confronts mystery with a breathtaking directness while keeping true to her lyricism.

Ann Christensen
No one is painting landscapes with the intensity, economy, and daring of Ann Christensen, whose bold oils look like a hybrid of wild Weimar expressionism and the meticulous subtlety of Arthur Dove. Christensen has figured out how to deliver imagery that is simultaneously brazen and orderly, hallucinogenic and sober, otherworldly and familiar. She achieves such unlikely symmetries by taking on large scenes - mountain ranges, pastures, ocean bays - and reducing them to their essence. This reducing, this rendering occurs in form as well as color.

Take her 1994 "Sheltering Sky". There are only four components. In the foreground, a field lies starkly divided, and as viewers we enter the painting through its shadowed half in the bottom of the frame. At eye level this has the effect of making you feel that you're wearing a visor, that you're protected by distance and shade from the high summer heat. Beyond where the sun beats on yellow and green verdure, a dark line of trees extends horizontally; above them there's a nearly cloudless sky. Despite the paucity of elements, the painting succeeds at complexity, even drama. With a sky so cloudless, where's the shade coming from? A storm must be approaching, but that's happening behind us, beyond the frame. The power of the painting comes from what looms outside it.

The seemingly simplistic use of color, the broad swashes that call to mind entire vistas, is also deceptively rich. Her 1996 "Signs of Spirit" qualifies as signature Christensen in part for the way it makes the outrageous seem natural, the molten, red, undifferentiated land in the foreground above which polyps of paint substitute for cumulous clouds. We look for sunsets in the sky; Christensen's point is that there are other places to look, that the earth itself is no less vital than the air in its daily movements. And then, when you think you've got things pretty much figured out, your eye catches on the red cloud, the same red as the earth. Christensen confronts mystery with breathtaking directness while keeping true to her lyricism. If she were a poet, she'd be Dylan Thomas.

by Christopher Millis