SEGALMAN AT 90

Not every artist can paint a whisper with a loaded brush or make the sun shine bright on a crowded New York City street by wiping away a black screen of black ink with a cotton rag…Richard Segalman could.

As he kept a foot in the door for lyrical beauty to remain in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, amid the Modernists and post modernists that he adored, this Contemporary American Impressionist brought us into his world of luxurious drama with every composition; Ayesha looking east, Diane with a white boa, Simi posing as Whistler’s mother, Alice being singularly Alice. Each draped in something that he could cut a dark into, and by which he could be reminded of his mother or Vivian Leigh. It had little to do with fashion and everything to do with light.

For Segalman it began with good drawing. You’ll see that in this exhibition, you’ll also see pastel paintings that illustrate that same excellence in good drawing, that also pummels pure pigment into the page with a ferocity of a banter weight. His watercolors enviously poured from his brush with a fluidity that somehow conjured the time and place and mass of the figures and structures he was privy too, the early Woodstock watercolors could not have been painted anywhere else on God’s green earth.

Such was his love of place; you will see his most beloved places as well as his most beloved models from his most beloved collector friends—and forgive me, I know I have overlooked multitudes of collections nearby for which I will be chastised as a curator—this task has been more daunting than I first imagined. To have been steeped in Richard’s world for these past few months has been a wonder. Welcome to the world of the pursuit of light, beauty and good painting.

Kate McGloughlin
March 2024