Rosalyn A. Engelman

 

  

Quotes About My Work

 

“Rosalyn Engelman's bold brush strokes are technically masterful. Her color sense is expressive and flawless. Her paintings convey the spectacular combination of serious, stimulating depth while retaining a sense of meaningful beauty.”
- Michel Cox Witmer, Board Member of the European Fine Art Fair

“Rosalyn Engelman uses her skills as a visual artist to cast light on the vulnerability of the individual victim.”
- Laura Kruger, Curator, Hebrew Union College Museum, 2008

“She puts vibrant color, sensuous tactility, and a gestural immediacy skin to Abstract Expressionism to the service of social activism.”
- Ed McCormick, Managing Editor Gallery & Studio, 2008

“An artist who doesn't mind scrutiny.”
- Carl MacGowan, Newsday, 2005

“One has to admire Engelman's expert handling of the basic properties of paint, the juxtaposition of various hues, the manipulation of the physical surface of painting and the artist's feeling for the compositional balance.”
- Charlotta Kotik, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Brooklyn Museum, 2005

“The painter's painter.”
- Charlotta Kotik, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Brooklyn Museum, 2005

“Rosalyn Engelman's 'Echo Sonata': A Career-Crowning Achievement.”
- Ed McCormick, Managing Editor Gallery & Studio, 2005

“Standing before Engelman's huge canvases, one almost has the feeling of being present at that precise moment in the history of civilization when form morphed into sign and written language was born.”
- Ed McCormick, Managing Editor Gallery & Studio, 2005

“All my respect and gratitude is given to Rosalyn A. Engelman for sharing her vision, beauty and mastery of form and color that truly reaches a most magnificent Crescendo.”
- DIana Mille, Ph.D, Gallery Director, Thomas J. Walsh Art Gallery, Fairfield, Connecticut, 2003

“Rosalyn Engelman is a consummate painter.”
- Charlotta Kotik, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Brooklyn Museum, 2005

“'Poems of Provence' pulsates imagery and light. Through the rhythmic juxtaposition of red, yellow and oranges hues applied in uniformly articulate brush strokes. Engelman created a dramatic optical illusion of unceasing vibration.”
- Charlotta Kotik, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Brooklyn Museum, 2005

“Engelman does not set out to paint a specific scene; rather, through an uncanny understanding of the given features of a specific place, such as the quality of light of the predominance of a particular color, she confronts us with the visualization of the precise effect of that place.”
- Charlotta Kotik, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Brooklyn Museum, 2005

“In 'And beauty came like the setting sun' as in other recent paintings, vibrant red, yellow and orange hues are employed in center with deeper blues and other darker colors, layered with feathery cursive strokes that lend Engelman's canvasses such of their energy and depth.”
- J. Sanders Eaton, Gallery & Studio, 2001

“Engelman combines a linear fluidity akin to Mark Tobey's 'white writing' with a succulent tactility and a painterly intensity that can only be compared to Jackson Pollack.”
- J. Sanders Eaton, Gallery & Studio, 2001

“When I first saw your paintings I was profoundly moved. As we approach the end of this Century of unprecedented suffering, the slaughter of innocents stands as one of the defining and most distressing elements, a deep scar on humanity. Your work is a silent and dark memorial to those victims. Its dark tones and dense imagery force one to stop and examine deeper meanings, both of the individual paintings and of the lessons of our world's recent history.”
- Gabriella Kirk McDonald, President, International Criminal Tribunal of the Former Yugoslavia, 1999

“A sense of human and political tragedy seeps into and saturates her compositions.”
- Maureen Flynn, Gallery & Studio, 1999

“Engelman works the surfaces of her canvases with a wide variety of strokes to achieve a textural richness and a gestural vigor to rival Milton Resnick's well known overall compositions layering a densely woven network of strokes that absorb and reflect light with great subtly of effect.”
- Maureen Flynn, Gallery & Studio, 1999

“Not since Ad Reinhardt and Franz Kline, back in the glory days of the New York School, has any painter employed black with such conviction. Unlike Reinhardt and Kline, though, Engelman employs black as a vehicle for emotions as well as for formal explorations and this lends a psychological resonance to her paintings that is not often seen in the rather austere precincts of contemporary abstraction.”
- Maureen Flynn, Gallery & Studio, 1999

“All painted on large canvases that confront and envelop the viewer with their physical immediacy and impact, Engelman's 'Nocturnes of the Soul' hark back to the heroic period of Abstract Expressionism.”
- Maureen Flynn, Gallery & Studio, 1999

“Her post-modern approach allows for literary, as well as visual references to enter her paintings, enriching them by virtue of a seamless synthesis of form and content.”
- Maureen Flynn, Gallery & Studio, 1999

“At once somber and sonorous, her painted surfaces are alive with nuances, ranging from matte grays as dim as ash to a viscous black as shiny as freshly spilled blood, to the soft, vertical ghost drips that inspired her to name one especially haunting large canvas, 'Dry Tears.'”
- J. Sanders Eaton, Gallery & Studio, 1999