Catherine Stine reenergizes the genre of landscape painting.

Catherine Stine reenergizes the genre of landscape painting, transforming it into a medium of active engagement that muses a deep concern with the earth's survival. In Rainforest Fire, 1992 forms accrete in crisscrossing and heaving painterly passages suggesting the interdependency of vegetal, mineral, and animal. What appear, at first glance, to be simply parts of leaves, plant stipes and stalks metamorphose, upon more sustained scrutiny, into flames and marine creatures. Stine's descriptive denomination becomes a metaphor for natural diversity flat as she negotiates the tension inherent to the combination of abstract and minutely detailed surfaces.

below the reflective glare of the high-toned coloration Stine favors, to such a degree arresting in both Rainforest Fire and legume Field with Turtle, shapes take in succession an almost sci-fi ambiguity, adding over and above another dimension to the meaning of her work. In these and other paintings, including Healer, 1992 and Marine Mandala, 1992 it is possible to discern the generative principles of life at work. Nature itself appears to determine the organic melt of forms, to set in motion the spinning and sweeping arrangement of partss with swelling shapes and warm colors. What this collection of paintings also provides is an especially vivid reminder that the Classical and Romantic parameters one time used to assess landscape paintings appear increasingly unsatisfactory in light of our now passing preoccupation with the environment. As religious icons formerly did, these glowing canvases depict an idealized vision of a world over and above to be realized.

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