"Illuminated Lives"

In her recent series of still life paintings, Betty Ann Hogan explores the patterns created by the light that passes through a window in her home. Hogan places her subjects-vases of flowers, bowls of fruit-in various positions on a ledge just inside the window's frame and with quick, deft strokes records the simple phenomenon of sunlight reaching into and illuminating an interior space.

Hogan is not interested in nuances of tone and hue. Instead, using a reduced palette that relies heavily on black and white, she focuses on broad contrasts of light and shadow, creating a moody, affecting poetry. Like pearls uncovered by a tide, the pink roses in "Shabbos Morning Bouquet" illuminate their grey, murky environment as they unfold to greet the day. "Simple White" depicts a vase bristling with tulips emerging from shadow as sunlight rakes across its surface. Here the sun finds and briefly illuminates a fragment of life. The fact that both the day and the flowers will soon fade gives this painting its poignancy-we delight in the moment even as we mourn its passing.

Illumination, of course, has a double meaning. Light not only reveals the surfaces of things, it can also penetrate their hidden meanings. Like each of us, Hogan's bits of nature are both fair and fleeting. Her paintings, with great humility, remind us of our own brief moment in the sun.

-- Nancy Grimes