Infinite Distance: Architectural Compositions

"Sometimes there are forms that have been inspired by photographs of architectureand often I don't remember where they have come from or I couldn't find the actualphotograph again, but it's just that I have been intrigued by the way the light flowsthrough a tree or the pattern that light made on a column or pillar that had fluting orserrations....I could never...go someplace I like the sound of and make paintings anddrawings and so forth. I don't do that. I look, you know? "What a supremely disciplined and inspired "looker" Helen Lundeberg was.Throughout this catalogue, in works selected from a forty-year period, in image after image afterimage, the artist delivers the physically palpable and entirely delicious experience of lookingthrough things. Her paintings move you beyond the curve of the object then out the window tothe sea or through the beam of a wall to a ceiling opening where the morning light spills in oraround the corner as the sunlight bleeds through dusk to dark. If ever an artist could be honestlyaccused of 'taking the long view', it is Lundeberg. In truth, 'infinite view' is more appropriate. Inthese compositions, ruthlessly winnowed to the purest visual necessities, Lundeberg patientlyinsists we see not just the view, but how she herself understood the view. Even in identifyingthe work, Dark View (pl. 52), Inner-Outer Space (pl. 1), A Quiet Place (pl. 5), Silent Interior(pl. 7 and pl. 10), Untitled (Moonlight) (pl. 20), Scene of a Dream (pl. 19), the artist announces nodestination and, as for traveling, she has already done that for you. All she asks is that you getyourself to the painting and let it carry you from there.