SELECTED CRITICAL OVERVIEW

"Colorist Rose Olson has a summery little show in Kingston's members' gallery. She paints like a minimalist, in simple horizontal bands of color, but her work is lush. Her thin washes on wood panel let the wood grain show through, revealing the organic through the geometric.

Now and then she uses almost transparent opalescent pigments. "Warm Encounter" is mostly bright orange, with bold purple stripes and a thread of blue, set off by the barest veil of sparkly silver that winks at you, if you care to notice. These quiet nuances play beautifully against her warm, gaudy contrasts."
— Cate McQuaid, The Boston Globe, June 10, 2009

"Rose Olson paints horizontal bands of acrylic on vertically-grained
maple veneered panels. Thinly applied layers of glossy translucent
pigments—high-key reds, pinks and oranges and muted blues and
greens—highlight variations in the wood’s grain. A quartet…(Pulse,
Diffusion Rising, Five to Nine and Warm Alignment)…draw the viewer
inside. From a distance, their luminous color shimmers…"
-Anne Krinsky, Art New England, December/January, 2009

"Straightforward and delicate, Olson’s paintings suggest what thirteenth-century-painter Cimabue might have done had he been a color-field painter"
— David Raymond, Art New England, December/January 2007

"Another Boston painter, Rose Olson, has a quietly stunning show at Kingston Gallery...Olson has aptly used the minimalist form of stripe paintings to contain the mysteries of heat and cold, light and dark."
— Cate McQuaid, The Boston Globe, Friday, May 14, 2004

"...these images assert themselves as objects. That they possess a meticulous glaze only reaffirms their presence. Despite the seeming regularity of her orderly compositions, Olson does not close out experimentation, flexibility or gesture...One thinks of prisms when looking at Olson's work. There's a crystalline fracturing of color into constituent bands, and almost a gilding to many of her surfaces...That gilding serves the traditional purpose of claiming space for the sacred, though within Olson's modernist idiom that spirituality becomes universal rather than denominational."
— Shawn Hill, artsMEDIA, May 2004

"Rose Olson's paintings temper mathematical precision with a sensual play of light and color...Her palette deliberately recalls glistening shades of nail polish, yet is handled with great restraint. The game seems to be in maintaining a meditative space with exuberant bursts of color...The effect is mesmerizing, the colored surface transmuting as one moves back and forth in front of the work."
— Diana Gaston, Art New England, June/July 2003

"Looking more closely, the complexity and richness given to these stripes of color by Olson's thinly applied horizontal and vertical layers of paint reveal that within these stripes she has in fact delineated a deep emotional and meditative space."
—Mary Bucci McCoy, Art New England, April/May 2003

LINKS

www.kingstongallery.com

www.geoform.net