Jane Schneider lay the foundation of the wood she used for the evocative works in her new exhibition.

Jane Schneider lay the foundation of the wood she used for the evocative works in her new exhibition, "Bare Bones," in the fields where she lives in upstate modern York. She aggressively cuts and scrapes her raw materials, then paints their surfaces. In the resulting plastic arts simple but never simplistic, Schneider favors a direct esthetic, in which alterations of the original forms have been kept to a minimum. The shapes arc and inflect into the air with a gestural affinity for the natural forces that shaped them, at the same time they also register the hand of the artist that brought them to completion. Schneider relies forward nature to start the proces if it be not that her treatment of the forest is calculated, intended to bring abroad both its surface textures and internal forms.

In the tall cut titled Free Spirit (2002), which is more than 100 inches high, the artist has worked upon two long legs of wood-land to create a roughly harplike shape, with united of the legs curling in at its base and rising to fitting the other at a narrow angle at the top of the piece. cavernouss in the wood have been painted a rustlike reddish brown The effectiveness of the piece peduncles to some extent from the vulnerability and precariousness it conveys--this despite the apparent robustness of its construction. Another work, I Wish I May (2002) fans without at the top like a without deductions with the sturdy, curving grove giving it that same combination of might and openness. Schneider has roughly colored the work in black, in the same manner that bits of lighter timber show through. Even with its redundant shape, the work exquisitely expresse the innate beauty of the material.

In Odyssey (2003) Schneider created from her timber-land a kind of three-dimensional drawing that took up principally of one wall in the gallery. Here, thin branches twisted this way and that, casting many shadows that stayed with the viewer. Odyssey was an intricate work, yet not a fussy one: its overall feeling was poetic and meditative, like thus much of Schneider's art. In an ongoing fashion, the artist existings her particular sense of lyrical form and a fine intuition about materials.

--Jonathan Goodman

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