Elizabeth Hack Critical Review

Elizabeth Hack paints horizontal bands of color that develop into rich impressions of atmosphere, ocean and landscape. To create the works of her 10-year long series, “Waves”, the artist scrapes paint across canvas, panel or paper in one stroke of the hand, again and again, in a layered fashion until the work achieves a meditative and material balance. A thin line of black ink delineates smaller detail to bring the viewer intimately closer to the work while suggesting water droplets or speckled light. As symbols of the eternal sunset or landscape, Hack’s paintings inspire an immediate sense of peace and the presence of a universal life source still a mystery to us all.

Delene Hessinger, Art Advisor
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Interview with Elizabeth Hack: How We Work – [pdf]

Carol Markos
Editor, Writer, LAMA books
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Artweek Magazine Review

“California Contemporary” at Baxter Chang Patri Fine Art

“… quiet paint and ink meditations on the never-ending ebb and flow of ocean tides. Lovely and serene, these works showed imperfect and varied lines that rolled and oozed across the canvas. She used metallic sparingly to play up the cool greens, blues and corals that echoed a seaside palette. Over the painted surface, Hack outlined each wave’s nuance with a thin black line of ink.”

Christine Brenneman, San Francisco, CA
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“On the surface, Elizabeth Hack’s busy mixed-media drawings resemble some weird mutant strain of minimalism. But while your hardcore minimalist is content with arranging simple geometric shapes on top of monotonous backgrounds, this artist avoids minimalism’s “hackneyed” purity (and sterility). She feels that a musical analogy results from placing brightly colored blobs within dynamic web of ink. While these pulsating works do have a certain jazzy feel (vaguely recalling Wassily Kandsinsky’s abstract improvisations”) a biological metaphor seems even more in order. Her fluid compositions, in fact, present an organic world in perpetual flux, and one you would normally expect to find under a microscope; amoebas swimming in protoplasm, cells joining and separating, circulatory systems churning away.”

Critic’s Choice, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Review by Harry Roche.