“Dorothy Browdy Kushner”
by Betje Howell, Art Critic
1979
Santa Monica Evening Outlook
Nature is the point of departure in the painting of Dorothy Browdy Kushner. She works within the context of the Impressionists – using color as light. But whether her subjects are landscapes or the flowers in her garden – Dorothy Browdy Kushner is essentially a colorist.
Like her aesthetic predecessors, the Impressionists, she attempts to record on canvas — not what she visualizes as form but what she sees as light, breaking up a surface into patches of color. However, she forgoes the strict adherence of the “rainbow” or prismatic palette of the Impressionists.
When Dorothy Browdy Kushner paints flowers the overall patterns are transported into color masses – often covering the entire canvas without the slightest indication of traditional compositional elements.
Color configurations create shifting perspective and the subject matter recedes and advances in what is literally visual trickery. But this phenomenon is not to be confused with Op art.
In her landscapes special qualities are juxtaposed with form. And again there is an impression of shifting planes. Mountains are reduced to form and shape as are other natural formations.
The Costa Mesa artist – who received her Master of Arts in Fine Arts, at New York’s Columbia University, is backed by an impressive teaching experience in the public school systems of New York, Missouri and California.
Among her exhibitions are those of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Library of Congress, Smithsonian Institute, Pasadena Art Museum, Newport Harbor Art Museum, and most recently she was an award winner in the Annual Juried American Watercolor Society Exhibition at the Long Beach Museum of Art.
In this solo exhibition – Dorothy Browdy Kushner’s acrylic paintings reveal the essence of natural configurations which she has abstracted into pure form.
Working in a new series of paintings she explores the shapes of nature which she translates with personal iconography into riotous colors. In these recent works, Dorothy Browdy Kushner maintains her aesthetic distance – in that her works of art differentiate psychologically from reality. Her idiom continues to be uniquely individual.