To look at a painting by Eliza Auth is to be transported. Auth
does more than just paint a landscape, and she uses paint to make her
canvases glow with a mood and a feeling that hits the viewer
immediately. Her paintings are of nature, and yet Eliza Auth brings
something incredibly human to every setting she depicts, whether it
be a snow-covered plain, or a wind-swept sand dune.
Eliza Auth’s technique is so strong that one feels truly transported to
the location of her images, and the viewer too responds to her
paintings with the feelings, of bliss, of peace, of relaxation or
calm, that the images so wonderfully evoke. “Memory is what drives my
paintings,” says the artist, “and I am drawn to places that have a
connection to my past.” Herein lies the secret to the powerful warmth
of her Realist works. Bucolic as many of her scenes are on their own,
it is the amount of herself that Auth invests in each work that
gives it the extra power to keep the viewer staring, and bringing
them with her to the place of her easel and her reflections.
The current collection includes her works from such a variety of
locales as Maine’s Acadia National Park and New Jersey’s Island Beach
National Seashore, and also the lesser known but equally evocative
locations of her own Pennsylvania area. Her latest inspiration has
been the moody floodplain of the Susquehanna River Valley with its
rocky shores and undulating hills, and this show includes many of her
most recent works.
Time and memory are both important themes in this show. Auth uses water in many of her paintings to symbolize nostalgia, contemplation and reflection. The artist grew up on the water. “My parents were avid sailors and they taught me to pay attention to the weather and to read the changes in the light and the surface of the water.” When she moved to Philadelphia, she began to paint waterscapes because she missed living by the ocean. The process of painting water was a way of reliving the hours spent looking out over the ocean.
As Jean-Francois Millet has said, “It is treating the commonplace
with the feelings of the sublime that gives art its true power.”
Eliza Auth so readily sees the sublime in her surrounding scenery,
and her art is indeed testimony to this assertion of Millet’s.
“All of nature, no matter how insignificant, is worth contemplating,”
Auth asserts, and with her work, she makes that contemplation
irresistible.
“Memory and Meaning” is about taking the time to see the significance of the everyday, from babbling brooks to picturesque hilltops, a viewpoint which can sustain and enrich our lives.
