Ellen Altfest: Forever at the Frist Art Museum

With their scrupulously rendered detail, unlikely juxtapositions, and tightly woven compositions, Ellen Altfest’s paintings comprise an intimate poetry of the everyday. This exhibition’s title is inspired by Emily Dickinson’s line “Forever – is composed of Nows,” an encouragement to live fully in the present. Turning inward, away from the noise, distractions, and inattentiveness that characterizes much of contemporary experience, Altfest’s work reinforces the importance of mindfulness both for the viewer and herself.

Working from direct observation, Altfest often takes months or sometimes more than a year to finish a painting. While they seem to describe scenes as they appear at a given instant, the artist’s images are actually distillations of their subjects as she perceives them over time. Even as they extend realist traditions of portraying still life, landscape, and the male nude, some of her paintings also seem minimalist or abstract—cryptic excerpts from such surfaces as skin, cloth, or bark recreated as flat planes of texture and pattern that cover the entire canvas.

The things Altfest depicts might seem of little consequence in our age of high drama. But by so intently focusing on the implacable surfaces of humanity and nature, cropping out everything that might distract from the subject’s essence, she encourages viewers to sharpen their own powers of observation in learning to value the poetry of everyday life.