File:Lorraine Shemesh crescent 2013.jpg

Painting by Lorraine Shemesh, Crescent (oil on canvas, 75" x 48.75", 2013). The image illustrates a key body of work in Lorraine Shemesh's career from the 1990s onward: her "Painted Pool" series of realistic, large-scale, immersive paintings of figures viewed from under water in swimming pools. These works—often based on in-depth anatomical studies using dancers as models—balance contemporary realism with an abstract expressionist concern for gesture, rhythm and pattern. Later works in the series, such as this image, show a looser control influenced by painters such as Jackson Pollock, with once-solid, contained figures fragmented into abstract optical stimuli—rippling striations, refracted details, and passages of blazing light and incandescent color that writers likened to the work of J. M. W. Turner and Claude Monet They explore the complex choreography of human connection, universal experiences of temporality and mortality, and relationships between the body and space, tension and tranquility, disjuncture and harmony. Works in this series were publicly exhibited in prominent exhibitions, discussed in art journals and press publications, and acquired by major museums.

Artist Lorraine Shemesh. Copyright held by the artist.

Lorraine Shemesh

Entire artwork

Yes

The image serves an informational and educational purpose as the primary means of illustrating a key body of work in Lorraine Shemesh's career dating back to the early 1990s, when she began producing realistic, large-scale, immersive paintings of figures viewed from under water in swimming pools, which at distance function as classical, figurative compositions of athletic figures, but close up often dissolve into neo-impressionist investigations of pure light or lyrical abstraction. These works frequently employ anatomical foreshortening and the natural magnification caused by the changing undulation of water to energize the painting space,; they also exploit weightless quality of water enables to evoke bodily and out-of-body experience, transcendence of limitations, slowed time, dream and dance. In later works, she pushed the dissolution of form further, with figures completely melting into passages of pure abstract form, pattern and brushwork. Because the article is about an artist and her work, the omission of the image would significantly limit a reader's understanding and ability to understand this major body of work, which has brought Shemesh her widest recognition through museum acquisitions, prominent exhibitions and coverage by major critics and publications. Shemesh's work of this type and this series is discussed in the article and by critics cited in the article.

There is no free equivalent of this or any other of this series by Lorraine Shemesh, so the image cannot be replaced by a free image.

The image will not affect the value of the original work or limit the copyright holder's rights or ability to distribute the original due to its low resolution and the general working of the art market, which values the actual work of art. Because of the low resolution, illegal copies could not be made.