Boston Globe Review
Her
studies are modest, firmly structured and scrupulously painted. The
palette suggests the predominant smoky greens, grays and browns of a
Courbet, but the accent of primary color In a meadow or orchard often
lends the scene optical sparkle. The artist knows how to subtly entice
the eye Into the composition via a winding path, and how to balance
terrain and sky, and a harmony between formal elements leads to successful
pictorial treatments. As
if to emphasize structural aspects, Her
painting is best when it permits an essentially classical temperament
to find expression in the dramatic force of underlying geometric structures.
Reducing landscapes to firmly organized shapes, Zander is wholly convincing
her work becomes less so when the handling looser; approaching the pure
impressionist technique of applying small patches of heavily loaded
brushwork, she has a tendency to overwork the canvas. The landscapes are framed in period yet are by no means pastiche. They stand on their own though what is more apposite than seeing them in a mill erected in 1860? The Schwamb brothers who built it would probably fancy Barbizón too. Boston Globe |
The
French Barbizón School with its solidly modeled forms and deep
space is a less obvious inspiration for a landscape painter today than
the later atmospheric work of the impressionists. In her exhibition
of paintings at the Old Shwamb Mill in Arlington, Rosamund Zander reveals
how satisfactory–and individually expressive–this response
to landscape can be. 
Zander
may concentrate on subjects seen close to the fronds of Bermuda vegetation,
the fountain-like motif of an apple tree or an all-over handling of
the convincing movements and shadows of foliage. Often there are complicated
internal rhythms to lend variety to the intervals of space. Impressive
in her paintings is its capacity to draw visual clarity out of flickering
and unstable natural phenomena, a sunshot Cape Cod dune or what the
French call sous bois," an atmosphere of diffused light beneath,
say, a densely interwoven tracery of leaves.