This exhibition THROUGH WATER: BETSY WEIS - A SURVEY 1987-2004 provides a unique and special opportunity to experience the artistic development of a maturing artist in her sojourn of establishing her vocabulary as a visual artist. Balancing the contradiction between formal and emotional issues, Weis' aesthetic vocabulary is expressed in these "dreamscapes" in elemental dualities reflecting a polarity between matter and spirit.

    By the late 1980's Betsy Weis' paintings had achieved a personal aesthetic revealing a strong continuity of purpose. These dark, somber, monochromatic works utilize an abstract visual language rooted in the spontaneous Abstract Expressionist mode in which the painting's imagery is the direct result of the physical creative process.

   This approach begins to change in the early 1990's as reflected in "Mermaid”, 1991, where drawing becomes less gestural and more directed.  This drawn imagery achieves a dominance in the painting entitled, "Cascade, 1993," in which the strong graphic lines allude to organic plant forms silhouetted against a top-lit undersea world. In "Him”, 1995 and “Her”, 1995, these abstracted plant forms seem to float in a mystical primeval luminosity and atmospheric space of a visually created unseen world.

   Seemingly less drawn from nature, during the late 1990's, Weis' paintings become more compositionally structured and formalized. In "Disclosure”, 1998, light and dark geometric shapes generate a visual surface tension between void and mass forms emerging on the picture plane.  This refinement and reductiveness continues in her paintings beginning in 2000 and culminates in 2002-2003 in a series of paintings one could call, "Emotional Vistas." These paintings read as landscapes, actually and metaphorically, because of the light and dark divisions of suggested earth and sky as defined by a strong horizontal dividing line across the canvas.

   These transcendental abstractions in sepia tones and luscious gradations of black and white are deeply ingrained in the romantic tradition of 19"' Century sublime tonal landscape paintings of J.M.W. Turner and George Inness.  However, freed from the depiction of the empirical world, these symbolic translations of earth, water and air provide a metaphor in nature that penetrates beneath the material surface of things and extract a religious essence.

   These sensuous mystical evocative paintings inspire meditation, uncommon in much of today's art, creating a poignant mood of intense communion with the most impalpable of nature's phenomena: light, water, color and atmosphere.

…When man, sensing the immense magnificence of nature, feels his own insignificance, and, feeling himself to be in God, enters into this infinity and abandons his individual existence, then his surrender is gain rather than loss.  What otherwise only the mind’s eye sees, here becomes almost literally visible: the oneness in the infinity of the universe…

Carl Gustav Carus

George W. Neubert
Director Emeritus & Brown Curator of Contemporary Art
San Antonio Museum of Art