Valentine Lagoon

Valentine Lagoon submerges a garden. Berkowitz works oil wet into wet on linen so that blooms of magenta, cobalt, and ivory unfurl and blur at once, suspended in a deep green-gold water that occupies the whole canvas. Slender vines fall from the upper edge, and small points of white light scatter through the depths like bubbles or distant stars.

The handling is what carries the work. Because the paint is worked while still open, every flower dissolves at its own edges into the field around it, and the picture never separates into figure and ground. The forms are simultaneously arriving and disappearing, which is the state the whole painting stays in.

Berkowitz's subjects are biophilia, femininity, and transformation, and her palette merges the romantic nostalgia of her London upbringing with the saturated glow of Los Angeles. Here that combination produces a lagoon that belongs to neither city and reads as remembered rather than observed, closer to the atmosphere of a dream than to any specific water.