Artwork Description

The Storm
Oil on canvas · 102.9 × 76.7 cm (40½ × 30¼ in) · signed lower left and again in pencil verso 

Lawrence Reiter works here in the atmospheric, half-dreamed register that runs through his landscapes. A tall field of bone-white ground rises to a dark massing of trees and a distant town at the upper left, crowned by a single burning disc of orange sun. The paint is built in a fine, granular stipple, dabs and flecks that gather into foliage and dissolve again into mist, so the whole surface hovers between representation and pure texture. It is a landscape less observed than remembered.

Scale and solitude are the picture's real subjects. A lone figure, sheltered beneath a small blue parasol against the weather the title announces, is the one cool and saturated note in an otherwise earthen palette, moving along a broken paling fence that stitches the foreground to the empty middle distance. The figure is small enough to read as an accent rather than an anecdote, and the surrounding quiet does the emotional work.

The result is a highly hangable, quietly poetic canvas of generous vertical proportion, the kind of atmospheric oil that anchors an interior without demanding it. Reiter trained at the Cleveland Institute of Art and worked as a design consultant, and in fashion alongside Richard Avedon and Vogue, before devoting himself to painting; that designer's eye is legible in the picture's restraint and balance.