Lisa Goldschmid
Green Sky dipitych
oil on canvas
44" x 92"
2005

Lisa Goldschmid
Distant Light
oil on canvas
52 ”x44"
2005

Lisa Goldschmid
Finally December
30" x 84"
oil on canvas
2005

We take great comfort in defining edges between this and that, between what we can control and what we cannot. Many boundaries are actually very fluid and fungible, not straight lines at all, elusive and unknowable. Things pass from one side to the other, rise from the earth into the sky or fall from the sky. Even the transition from life to death is not sharp. The infinite is not separated from the finite, but constantly approached by it.The illusory straight line between earth and sky is the impetus and connecting link in my recent work. Employing gesture, scribble and calligraphic line, I am attempting to paint that very permeable line. I seek a certain painterly chaos and abandon that mirror my uncertainty about what we can know and what we cannot. The work hovers between abstraction and landscape, without being precisely either.

I watch the bay closely from my house and studio. The colors and light of the view are endlessly changing. The weather can obscure the edge of the bay completely or brightly illuminate the white loading cranes across on the other side. Afternoon sun can make the windows in the hills above look on fire. The activity of ships and boats provides new color daily. I am fascinated, too, by the view to the west as you drive to the beach and see the ocean appear higher than the city and then the horizon line stacked above: strata that denote the edge of one and the beginning of the next, our sensible horizon or “apparent boundary". Trying to contain the uncontainable and tame the unknowable, I am stitching the sky to the sea to make firm the seam of the “apparent boundary".