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  Lizbeth Mitty
Reviews
 
New York Times
Art Guide
By Ken Johnson

New York Times, Febuary 1, 2002

With a loose Soutine-ish touch and lurid colors, this former painter of junkyards makes engagingly romantic, easel size panoramas of traffic on New York CIty Roadways, with skewed signs and power lines silhouetted against lush sunsets over New Jersey. Ms. Mitty lives near the World Trade Center site and was there on Sept. 11. Her pictures of the clean-up scene have painterly verve and a hellish beauty.


Villager: Notebook
Art out of the Ashes of Sept. 11
By WICKHAM BOYLE

Villager, January 16, 2002



There are many aphorisms that expose things like:
"If god gives you lemons, make lemonade."
"If god closes a door he opens a window."

In the wake of Sept. 11 we are beginning to see the fruits that rise from the lemons and closed doors that were hurled our way in Downtown Manhattan and the world.

There is an art show that has just opened not 10 blocks from the 16-acre scar left in my Downtown neighborhood. This show is hopeful, achingly well wrought and full of a vibrant before-and-after effect that will fill gallery-watchers with awe. The artist is Lizbeth Mitty and like her namesake, the self-effacing Walter Mitty of literature gone by, Ms. Mitty does not impose herself on you, she lets her art do that.

Her oil paintings are tiny gems or giant jewels of landscapes, really city scapes that show the grandeur of night lights, the towering inspiration of skyscrapers and yes, the jumpled terror of Sept. 11 and beyond. Liz Mitty's 26 paintings have a few things in common: they are a jumble of color and wonderful sliced visions of the city we love; they are strong and unflinching in the way they show us the crashed palm court and the World Financial Center or the rubble rising knit with flags and cranes

The press release from the Cheryl Pelavin Gallery says that Mitty's work is neo-expressionist, a phrase that may resonate with art historians and mavens. But to me the work is ethereal, beautiful and hopeful because I see that an individual looked at the city before and after the rubble, looked at the destruction long enough to extract the beauty from it and share it with the viewers.

We are all trying to find our way through the new paradigm, one where we don't know who to trust, what to feel or often where to shop, educate our kids or love our liberties. A wander through Liz Mitty's evocative, seamless show on Jay St. was another way back into a life of regular joy and the appreciation of all the life around me.