Betsy Kaufman: Visual Notes

Garden Cabin
By appointment only

Exhibition Catalogue

“My paintings have always represented a battle between order and chaos... I find that with my small paintings on paper, I can engage in a spontaneous ‘quiet’—minimal pieces of a more elemental and distilled nature. They are not fussed or labored over... they are small poems.”
Betsy Kaufman

“[Kaufman’s] paintings have many puzzles, but no problems.”
Barry Schwabsky

“There is a geometry of a sort [in Kaufmans work], and geometry is always about measuring things, delimiting them... [Kaufman's] forms, objects, geometry always seem to be in motion or off balance, not in the sense of the dynamism of, say, a Suprematist composition a la Malevich, but rather in the midst of an internal process or shifting that the viewer can experience as a pleasant kind of imbalance, perhaps even a sort of shimmying, as of a vehicle (painting is that vehicle) that is taking you somewhere. It's in motion, you're not in control, but you are part of it, and it feels good.

And more than that: it communicates the happiness of being moved along by the right movement of life itself. [Agnes] Martin had a funny saying for this: ‘Happiness is being on the beam with life—to feel the pull of life.’”
Barry Schwabsky