TitlePond's Edge
Artist
Robert Berlind
(American, 1938 - 2015)
Date1994
MediumOil on linen
DimensionsUnframed: 54 × 48 1/4 in.
Framed: 55 1/2 × 49 1/2 × 2 in.
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, NY, Gift of Robert Berlind, 2003
Object number2003.21
Label TextFor many years, Robert Berlind has painted subtle landscape paintings in a sotto voce that speak in a highly-nuanced language of visual poetics. Berlind was born in Brooklyn and after attending Phillips Academy of Andover, he received a B.A. from Columbia University before completing his B.F.A. and M.F.A. from Yale University. Water has been the subject of many of Berlind's landscapes and he continues to mine its infinite variations and incarnations in his paintings. A distinguished critic as well as a painter, in the tradition of Marsden Hartley, Fairfield Porter, and others, Berlind has produced some of the most insightful criticism on a range of modern and contemporary art."Pond's Edge" is part of a series of paintings of ponds by Berlind begun in the mid-1990s. A consummate student of nature, the artist deliberately crops many of his works, illustrating his interest in the abstract qualities of shimmering ripples in water and their sense of motion and transience. The artist is particularly interested in the reflective surface of water, the focus of "Pond's Edge." While Berlind has noted that painting reflections inherently recalls non-representational painting, he has also written that "The reflections that play on water are not merely deformations or inversions of what is reflected. They form a distinctly different field of visual interest outside the normal continuum of sensory stimulus."
