Review of Our Kids Play Together: A Show of Paintings by Elise Schweitzer and Laura Vahlberg

Review by Elana Hagler, guest contributor

 

Motherhood, especially in those very early years, has a way of paring life down to its essentials. Those first years are notoriously difficult for parents, and mothers in particular (who historically have borne the brunt of childcare and domestic life), who are also trying to pursue their life’s work. Life becomes about feeding, cleaning, sleeping when/if possible, and gazing at the miraculous mundane. Babies the world over have fingers, eyes, sweet folds of chub, downy bits of hair, and yet each in a unique and theretofore unseen combination. So, too, do the artworks, the creative offspring of these two young mothers, the painters Elise Schweitzer and Laura Vahlberg, distill the visual world into its most basic elements in a joyful but serious perceptual game.

Just as their five-year-old children play together, Schweitzer and Vahlberg’s paintings have a playful dialogue with one another across the gallery walls. There is a kinship to the work, resulting from mutual influences such as Joseph Albers, Charles Hawthorne, and Edwin Dickinson. There is the tension between depicting air and depth and the assertion of the flatness of the picture plane. There is the simplification of forms into their essential color spots and the sophisticated tuning of delicate color relationships.

The poetry of painting inhabits the tensions between these contradictions: flat versus spatial, simplified shapes versus sophisticated colors, rooted in the historical language of painting and in these works perceived afresh. Vahlberg’s work echoes the simplified forms, muted colors, and tangible surfaces of the landscapes of Giorgio Morandi, Albert York, and E. M. Saniga. Likewise, Schweitzer’s paintings evoke the angular, stylized architecture of early Renaissance painters like Piero della Francesca, and the simplified but always atmospheric landscapes of Diana Horowitz.

As children grow, the intimate world of milky breath and soft peach fuzz expands to carefully sliced grapes, clumsy first attempts at socializing, and rooms that are slowly swallowed by the ever-growing clutter of toys. Schweitzer’s landscapes bring to mind the simplified forms of early building blocks, drawing a juxtaposition between the common, close, and small with ancient, massive architectural forms. Valhberg’s work is reminiscent of board books for toddlers, with simplified shapes and essentialized colors. At the same time, her paintings are a result of internalizing all that deep painterly knowledge and of attempting to view the visible world with a fresh and innocent eye. Even as we nurture and teach our children, the more sensitive we are, the more we also learn from them: we learn to cast off that which is unessential; we learn to embrace the moment; we learn to delight in the ordinary. And we learn that life, as heavy as it can be, is elevated when approached with a sense of curiosity and earnest appreciation.

Elise Schweitzer and Laura Vahlberg’s paintings will be exhibited at Steven Francis Fine Arts in Lynchburg, VA, from October 6, 2024 to November 16, 2024.