Wheaton Wire

Issue date: 11/8/06 Section: Arts & Culture

Without Doubt, oil on canvas, 2005.

Phyllis Berman's ten-year retrospective, "Paintings and Drawings, 1996-2006," opened last week at the Beard and Weil Galleries in Watson.

A prominent Boston-based artist, Berman has chosen these newly renovated spaces as the site of her mid-career show.
Berman's paintings are the centerpiece of the exhibition. The realistic canvases are nostalgic and serene, but still artfully modern in their juxtapositions of color and form.

Using oils on large (48 or 50 x 44 inch) canvases as well as multi-paneled polyptychs, Berman's still-lifes are formally beautiful. Her use of space on expanses of this size is admirable, never cluttering the neutral, shadowed backgrounds of her works.

Berman also uses this mastery of color and shallow planes in her multi-panel paintings of model airplanes against blank, shadowy walls.

In the Weil Gallery, charcoal, ink, pencil, and chalk studies for her works are displayed alongside a small red chair, with which viewers will become well acquainted after a walk around the gallery.

This show gives visitors the opportunity to see the evolution of a prominent artist, and to become excited for Berman's future work.

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