Elaine Marinoff is an intuitive painter. Her references are both external (nature) and internal (metaphysical). One might speak of her paintings as a dialectical search of an equivocation between what she perceives as happening in nature and the balance she attempts to strike within herself as an artist, as someone capable of transforming what she sees into a cataclysmic sense of reality. Yet this cataclysm also has a certain harmonious aspect, a redemptive side.

Her paintings are visibly dark. The light is hidden, sheltered from view. One may look for crevices, and openings.

There is a certain tension on the surfaces of her paintings that is more spatial than formal. This distinction is a necessary one in order to come to terms with Marinoff's working method. Marinoff states that she is interested in "the delicate balance of our complex ecosystem at this time in history." She further states that she has a more internal vision, one that is embedded in her "deepest self." This is fundamentally a metaphysical notion-that somehow painting can carry the weight of this belief, that it can penetrate below the substratum of superficial existence and go to a deeper spiritual core.

It would not appear so much as a contradiction to say that the painter takes her visible subject matter from outward perceptions of the Earth and transforms it into something internal, another kind of vision. While nature is being perceived, there is an inner-nature that is becoming transforming. For Marinoff, this transformation occurs through the creative act.

There is a feeling of the deluge in Marinoff's paintings which is reminiscent of Leonardo's famous sketches. The surfaces are thick like mud clogged waterways, as if to suggest that the water must continue to move through these quagmires. The rivers have to cleanse themselves, and in doing so, they fulfill their role in Nature. The umber and sienna pigments are mixed into a crusty layering; a build-up that not only implies physical depth but an illusory space, a sequence of spatial planes that are shifting in relation to one another.

The Sound captures a metaphorical depth, a sudden vortex of interconnected forces emanating through the spatial field. This, the representation of Nature is convincing again as a dialectical encounter between exterior perception and the transformation of that phenomenon into an emotional presence. It is the process of transformation that is the key.

One can draw many associations. On the visual level, one may think of the art brut period of Dubuffet-those dense, unremitting surfaces-except for the inexorable insistance that Marinoff gives to the presence of light. From another point of view, one might consider Manzoni's scatological metaphor in relation to the production of art. While these associations are not primary in Marinoff's approach as a painter, they do help situate her aesthetic within an outsider position. This is not to say that she is doing "outsider art," an inappropriate epithet applied to presumably naïve painters. Both in terms of skill and intuition, Marinoff is far too sophisticated a painter to have this term apply. Yet her outsider position is one in which the pictorial narrative in a traditional, even pre-Romantic sense, offers a statement that eludes the purely formal.

There is another aspect of Elaine Marinoff's work that should be mentioned: the drawings. As fluid, linear sketches, spacially constructed in relation to the surface, Marinoff again reveals the transformational substance that pulls her perceptions of nature into the interior: her inner nature. It is a process of entering the deluge, of confronting the morass, of transcribing her apprehensions, so as to make Art. In this sense, Elaine Marinoff's paintings communicate a record to experience: a passage that confronts reality, rather then denies it. This is the crux of her message.

Robert C. Morgan, an internationally respected art historian and critic, lives in New York City. He is a professor of the history and theory of art at Rochester Institute of Technology. Morgan's books include, New Media Arts, After the Deluge, and Conceptual Art.