South End News, September 19, 1996

"The deceptive surfaces of the inner landscape"

(caption) Daring Ferocity: Among Ann Christensen's deceptively simple images is the 1996 painting "Voice of the Soul."

One of the uniquely American contributions to the modernist vision is natural abstraction: an appreciation of and attention to the disembodied, ethereal, unformulated forms that occupy the real world.

In "Natural Immersion," Carol Anne Meehan's wonderfully curated exhibit at the Boston Center for the Arts, nine artists, eight of whom reside in New England and all of whom are from the original colonies, aim to look at the natural world for both its beauty and its strangeness. Part of what makes the show important is the tightrope it walks: The inspiration may be the natural world, but the results don't necessarily want to take you back there.

There is something disturbing, for instance, in the orderly, manicured and accomplished landscapes and seascapes of Ann Christensen's paintings. While the images are utterly simple - a blue sky above, a yellow field in the foreground, mountains suggested beyond - the results are anything but simple. For one thing, Christensen wields her brush or knife with a daring ferocity: a cloud in a stroke, a mountain in a stroke, a field in a stroke or two. You get the sense of impatience, but you also get the sense of an impatience born of hard-won knowledge. She knows perfectly well what she's doing and what she's demanding; it turns out to be a lot. Ironically, and appropriately, there is nothing particularly reassuring about Christensen's take on the seemingly bucolic scenes she renders. It takes a while, for instance, to appreciate that the ocean in one of her works is the color purple, and the fact that it takes a while to realize what's "wrong" is related to the painting's achievement. Alter the color of a simple form and watch everyone's reaction do somersaults; color combines with technique in her frames to deliver a vision of the natural world that seems at once fecund and irradiated. Christensen's accomplishment hints at a subterranean terror: Everything's in order and something's terribly wrong.

by Christopher Millis