Contributed by Elizabeth Johnson / Two solo exhibitions at The Painting Center, Claire McConaughy’s “Uncultivated” and Tracy Burtz’s “What She Knows,” respectively present external and internal versions of powerful female spaces, generating an unexpected synthesis. McConaughy’s large, vibrant diptych Blue, Yellow, Green, Pink grabbed my attention first, like early spring days that turn hot fast. I was stunned by the hyper-pink, Van Gogh-style cherry blossoms at once amplified by acid yellow and Easter grass green and subdued by a blue background. A shower of downward tumbling petals balances rising and leftward leaning branches. Perhaps this tribute to the season of renewal also alludes, ironically, to extreme temperature changes and scary weather.
Birch Bones in Spring leverages baby blue and princess pink in depicting white bark interrupted by wet-looking brown and black patches. In Three Knees, McConaughy renders lichen-covered, knobby, peeling birches in scratchy yellow-green, brown, and orange brushstrokes scribbled into white, rooting the ghostly trees in bare, burnt sienna earth. Focusing on tree trunks, these two works cast spring as an invasion of factory-made greens across an empty and fertile forest, as color energizes a painter after months of grey.
How do I Paint a Rose? more somberly asserts broken patterns of shady and sunlit leaves and stems supporting delicate pink and red roses, rotating and wobbling in wild vortexes. McConaughy’s divinely messy roses are as unique as eyes, faces, and stars. One clump of them dissolves above a paint-smeared wooden palette, nodding to the tools of her trade. Forsythia by the Woodpile goes a step further: two paint-splattered logs at the foot of a forsythia bush commingle lumber and a pagan cross suggesting art as form of religion. McConaughy’s work pushes past polite aesthetics, situating tender plants and dappled forests in rough, willful space that reflects bold, creative womanhood.
Tracy Burtz composes safe, well-lit, emotional environments – welcoming rooms inhabited by quiet, well-dressed women, thinking and writing alongside loyal pets. Patterned, semi-transparent, light-capturing fabrics, wall treatments, and domestic objects keep the world outside. During the day, their private world is flooded with bright Taj Mahal tones, at night bordered by storybook buildings or feathery darkness. The paintings seem to use silence to preserve narrative. For instance, Wildflower freezes the moment in which a young woman gazes at the viewer. Will she say what she’s thinking? Burtz herself notes that “when we are alone with our thoughts, there is a kind of clarity that doesn’t always need to be spoken aloud. The paintings hopefully hold that moment of knowing without explaining it.”
Almost Midnight pictures two women at a candlelit, checkered table in front of a nighttime cityscape that recalls Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold. In a skirt that matches the night, one woman cups a candle or lighter silently while another seems to absorb city shadows into her skin. Unifying the painting’s surfaces are textured brushwork and chiaroscuro. For Burtz, distorting composition yields silent dramas. Titled after a phrase in Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “Five Flights Up,” Enormous Morning seems to stretch time with an extra-long dog’s leg and a spreading skirt. Unfolding compresses women and dogs into an overhead view of a crowded couch by aligning human and canine elbows. After Patio Song counterpoises female twins in different dresses separated by diminishing perspective.
The painting Majesty stands out. A bare-chested girl wearing a crown and her white dog confront the viewer head-on, four neutral eyes meeting two. The girl is central, the dog supporting her left side with white paws dangling like the girl’s hands. According to Burtz, as her mother neared the end of her life, the artist was “longing for a sense of strength and tranquility” and recruited their dog Duke, ten years’ gone, to arrive at “a mixture of vulnerability and quiet resilience.” Majesty and McConaughy’s Blue, Yellow, Green, Pink dominate the proceedings here, establishing both the contrast and the continuity between internalized and externalized attention.
“Tracy Burtz: What She Knows” and “Claire McConaughy: Uncultivated,” The Painting Center, 547 West 27th Street, Suite 500, New York, NY. Through March 28, 2026.
About the author: Elizabeth Johnson is an oil painter, art writer, and curator based in Easton, PA. Her reviews and interviews have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, ArtSpiel, The Artblog, Roborant Review, Delicious Line, Painters on Paintings, in addition to Two Coats of Paint.
