Chance Encounters
Ilana Manolson’s landscape paintings slice through time, space and geography to reveal compressed and complicated after-images that only memory and imagination can conjure. Her processes, developed over years of studying botany and exploring the natural world through hiking and kayaking while being an accomplished painter, reflect a generous perspective on how direct experience evolves when taken into the studio. Like so many of her predecessors, Manolson sketches en plein air and returns to her indoor sanctuary to literally reframe her initial sensory observations. And it is what happens at the easel that transforms her landscapes into sites for contemplation, conflict and conjecture about some of the confounding issues in contemporary painting as well as our current climate crisis.