Ms. Sverdlove received her B.F.A. from the Cooper Union Art School. She also studied with Richard Diebenkorn at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Her landscape, seascape and other paintings are in numerous collections, both private and public. Among the institutions that own her work are: Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Owens-Corning Collection of the Toledo, Ohio Museum, Purdue University, Marymount College, New York, Saban Entertainment (LA), Lomas and Nettleson (Dallas), Grand Hotel (Houston), Holiday Inn (Corpus Christi), and City Of Hope (Duarte, CA).

Her landscape, seascape and other paintings has been shown in numerous venues, including the Allan Stone Gallery (New York), the Cooper Union (New York), Hooks-Epstein Gallery (Houston), Longview Museum (Texas), Valley House Gallery (Dallas), Brand Library (Main Gallery in Glendale), Orlando Gallery (Los Angeles), the Maturango Museum, and the University of Judaism.

Many of her art works over the past decade are oil paintings, watercolors and graphics of California landscapes, particularly of the San Gabriel Valley, the Pasadena area looking northward to the San Gabriel mountains and southward to the buildings of downtown Los Angeles in the distance. Other paintings represent the California coast from Orange County to Monterey.

Nature provides us forms in flux. Clouds, water, waves and weather are in continual turmoil in the California landscape and coastal seascape, moving and churning through sequences of varying aspects. Their moods can vary from tranquil to ominous.

My art is concerned with these changing moods of our surroundings, not only to capture the moments of individual moods, but also to convey the movement from one landscape environment to another. I have been exploring the dynamics of unstructured forms, such as clouds and water in landscapes and seascapes.

My subjects are chameleons. They assume different guises at different times of day or different weather conditions. My clouds dramatize the landscape by giving it a dynamic character. At a deeper level, they speak of a force behind nature that is metaphysical. They speak of the mystery of creation.

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Zolita Sverdlove would seem to be attempting the impossible: rendering the Pacific landscape with an Atlantic brush and palette. The vastness and brilliance of California space, whether urban, rural, or entirely natural, would presumably resist the intricate, color-flecked touch of a painter trained on the East Coast who had inhered the lessons of European modernism, and whose style still admits a love for impressionism, Cézanne, van Gogh, German expressionism, and the masters of stroke and nuance who comprise the New York School. But having painted west of the Mississippi for most of her adult life, Sverdlove has found a middle road, coursing between the painterly tradition in which she was raised and the pictorial tradition most painters in California practice.

Sverdlove studied with Richard Diebenkorn, but even the limpid lucidity of his Ocean Park abstractions, not to mention the vivid, dramatically composed canvases he realized in his figurative period, do not marry the landscape attitudes of our two coasts the way Sverdlove’s paintings do. Without ever quite resorting to inventing colors, she finds a (literal) middle ground by exposing the impressionist palette to the California sun and by wielding a brush that finds the moisture seeping through this dry climate. The result is a kind of neo-Fauvism inflected by a consideration (however non-systematic) of Pointillist techniques. Objects such as buildings, trees and cars are as much inferred as described, their veracity affirmed not by detail but by spatial context. Sometimes Sverdlove’s rendering can border on the crude, as in the rendition of Highway 101’s arching approach to the Golden Gate Bridge in Tulle Fog over San Francisco. But the crudeness is not only offset by the sensitive description of the Bay behind it; that description practically requires the foreground to be “imagined” in, the busy red network of the girders, the unlikely green of the pavement, and the blockiness of the cars all conspiring to determine an obdurate foreground that makes the sweep of the Bay and the gathering solidity of the famously dense fog that much more immediate.

Similarly, Sverdlove’s realizations of the Los Angeles skyline, seen from several of its many vistas, rely on color, mass and even contour to determine atmosphere. Space takes care of itself, either in forceful recessions that arch back, almost revealing the earth’s curvature or in the classic foreground-midground-background planes we know from 17th century Dutch landscape painting. Sverdlove tackles the problem of animating light and shadow, of creating a convincing continuity between here and there, with the superposition of the expected – gray-blue or tan-brown midgrounds, for instance, or the ripple of distant mountains – with the unexpected – the red, quasi-autumnal trees in the foreground of View from the Getty or the tangle of a freeway interchange girdling the low waist of Freeway Frenzy.

Sverdlove’s style thus provides her a menu of approaches broad and flexible enough to apply to a range of landscape subjects. Her most consistent characteristics are her brush and her line; even her palette changes, and changes markedly, with the place and the mood (time of day, time of year, weather). Her Los Angeles vistas are lit by their skies, many of which are infused with clouds. (Like other non-native Angelenos, Sverdlove waits for winter storms and summer typhoons to bring “real weather” to the exquisite blue void above us.) Her mountain scenes are stark, stylized profiles evincing thin atmosphere and poignant chiaroscuro. (Fittingly, Sverdlove admires Ferdinand Hodler, the great Alpine post-impressionist.) Her shore views, in the 19th century French tradition of Courbet and Monet (but also distantly echoing the more naturalist tradition of the early California landscapists), follow craggy promontories and placid inlets out to seas that turn from still to roiling in the blink of an eye; that turbulence is mirrored or foreshadowed by the busy, gnarled brushwork with which Sverdlove handles the wave-eaten surfaces of the rocks. And when she gets the opportunity to delve into a rustic scene, such as her description of a location (Clear Pool: Hahmonga Watershed) in Pasadena’s Arroyo Seco, not far from her home, Sverdlove unleashes her full palette, applying it delicately and judiciously so that the painting, however vivid, never devolves into a Fauvist color-fest and always maintains that all-important sense of place.

That sense of place is the heart that beats at the core of Sverdlove’s art. She views everyplace as exotic stimulus for eye and hand. Indeed, her most conventional paintings here are of a place – indeed, a whole ecology – she has never inhabited. Her depictions of the Everglades are by no means conventional per se; they are simply less unusual than her California paintings, structured as they are around horizon lines that in most cases fall near the middle of the picture and, thus, determine a low panorama partially obstructed by the park’s “Sea of Grass.” Even so, Sverdlove’s Everglades are not those of the tourist; richly colored and steeped in a wet, wet light, these views, expansive or close up, celebrate the integrity of the region’s ecology – not as a political issue (although by inference, of course, they warn of its fragility and argue for its maintenance), but as an experience.

Such experientiality, to reiterate, is what makes Sverdlove’s painting tick. When we talk about “sense of place,” we are talking about the experience of a space and its contents – which is precisely what Sverdlove sets out to capture in her paintings. In this sense she is an abstract painter, concerned less with the facts and details of her subject matter than she is with its experiential – not just optical, but tactile and climatic – essence. This, of course, has been the goal of landscape painters since the landscape first emerged as a genre. But the goal of every landscape painter, from Rembrandt to Thiebaud, has been to bring the viewer to a place via a route forged by that painter. However Zolita Sverdlove measures up to the history of landscape painting in other ways, she has earned her place in it by forging her own route.

Los Angeles, March 2006