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  Lizbeth Mitty
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  Lizbeth Mitty paints the manmade landscape. For this solo show, she has turned her attention to Central Park. In scenes we know like the backs of our own hands, she reinvents the park, injecting a life force that we suspect was there, but that she has energetically made visual. As soon as we see it, we recognize it as the truth.

Mitty has painted and recorded New York for years. She is an acute observer, and is known for her portrayal of the tacky, run down neighborhoods of her Queens youth, or the portentous streets of downtown Manhattan at 5 p.m.—as places of irresistible optimism and life.

Her work has an ingenuous quality. She pulls no punches and applies her paint and color with a direct enthusiasm that is palpable.

"I continue to rely strongly on memories in the execution of my paintings. The colors and most of the forms are remembered. Consequently, the painting relies on invention as opposed to recreation. Execution becomes more about the medium of paint and the process of painting. At some point the image starts to reappear, and if the painting is successful it is charged with the energy of the memory."

Some of Mitty's views of Central Park include Spring's explosive coral and pink forsythias set against a gentle green pond and gray foot bridge. The majestic towers of the Upper West Side, washed in golden light, stand behind this innocent scene, almost as protective overseers. In another view, you are in the ramble, confronting Winter's bare trees and wane palette for a chilly late afternoon. A Kokoshka-like tangle of anxiety and threat suddenly appears. Or you are walking above one of the Park's roadways and through a stand of dark blue green, august and ancient conifers you see a back view of this manmade idyll, an asphalt employee parking lot.

"I try to create in the viewer the evocation of what it feels like to exist in the scene. The absence of the human figure enables the viewer to solely inhabit the painting.

I feel there is a sense of gathering doom and dread evoked in our day to day industrial/ political world. This exists alongside so much that is still so pleasant and rewarding about being alive. My painting is an action applying a kind of structure to the chaos that surrounds us."