Marjorie Norman Schwarz featured in the Summer 2022 Athenaeum Review: Marjorie Norman Schwarz’s new paintings, which she showed this past winter in Six Patiences at 12.26 in Dallas (December 11, 2021–January 22, 2022) grew out of an earlier body of work that she made between 2017 and 2020: a series of vertical canvases of about 36 x 30 inches each, along with some smaller horizontal pictures, which Schwarz painted with water soluble oils in subtle, shifting layers of pastel blues, greens, purples, and pinks at once soft and luminous. Rick Brettell wrote about those painted surfaces as not flat and material but multi-dimensional and vaporous, pictorial spaces that drew in the viewer but in which nothing was tethered or graspable. The new work, made over the course of 2021, is scaled up to twice the size: at 60 x 48 inches each, the six canvases in Six Patiences set up an encounter between painting and viewer that is both enveloping and calibrated to the human body. Schwarz has continued to work up her canvases with layers of water soluble oils, unthinned and sparingly applied, but her pictorial fields have become more varied and complex. These fields are decidedly tactile, engaging the body and the sense of touch. Overlapping passages of rhythmic hatching play against shifting, diaphanous grounds. The pastel palette is now punctuated with corals, vermilions, and lapis blues. Space is fragmented--open and sweeping, or close and jagged. The resulting compositions are looser, but more monumental. Monumental not in sheer size, however, but in the scope and seriousness of Schwarz’s painterly attention. Six Patiences open pictorial worlds on large and small scales, recalling both vast seascapes with dramatic atmospheric disturbances, and close studies of swaths of greening earth. - Sarah K. Kozlowski #marjorienormanschwarz Image: Marjorie Norman Schwarz, Untitled, 2021, Water soluble oil on canvas, 60 (H) x 48 (W) inches. Photo by @todoraphotography