‘Still,” Linda Reville Eisenberg’s aptly named solo exhibition at Guild Hall, is devoted primarily to her still life paintings, but also includes four portraits. One of them, “Lee,” won Top Honors at the museum’s 2021 Artist Members Exhibition, which earned her the current show.
Three of the portraits, one each of her two children and a self-portrait, have plain, monochromatic backgrounds, but Lee, her husband, is in front of crowded bookshelves, holding a cellphone to one ear and wearing sunglasses and a watch cap.
While in the gallery, Ms. Eisenberg overheard a visitor interpreting that work as a product of Covid, when people had to stay inside and read, and communication was mostly via cellphones rather than in person.
In fact, the painting, made from a photograph, had less to do with the pandemic than with its subject’s high-powered career as an editor and writer. “His normal everyday appearance was not that,” Ms. Eisenberg said during a conversation at her Sag Harbor studio. “He was the editor of Esquire, whose slogan is ‘Man at his Best.’ I wanted to get him in a more realistic way, and yet have his background and accomplishments somehow noted in the painting.”
Ms. Eisenberg grew up on City Island, a mostly blue-collar community she described as “very, very quirky, like a little Mayberry in the middle of this big metropolis.” She had a sailboat she and a friend used to sail across Eastchester Bay to get to their high school.
Thanks to a pair of aunts and an uncle, she was exposed as a teenager to the cultural life of Manhattan, especially the Metropolitan Museum, which she visited often. Recently, she came across a diary she kept at around 11 or 12 in which she wrote how much she wanted to be an artist when she grew up.
She did, and she is, but the road, as is so often the case, was winding. After elementary and secondary education at all-girls Catholic schools, she opted for Lycoming College in Williamsport, Pa., which is coeducational. She majored in art, but “as much as I wanted to be an artist, I had to make a living. My parents were of that generation that felt, you go to school, you graduate, and you support yourself. That did not leave me a lot of latitude to make art.”
She landed a job at CBS and “hopscotched through lots of different jobs there” over the next 13 years, ending up in public relations for the magazine division, which published special-interest periodicals like Field and Stream and Women’s Day. Later, she worked at her old port of call, the Metropolitan Museum, as editor of its in-house publication “The Column.”
The Eisenbergs met in 1982 and were married four years later. Because of his work, an odyssey ensued, taking them to London, where he started the British edition of Esquire, then to Knoxville, Tenn., and finally to Chicago, where they lived for 12 years.
Between moving, raising children, and taking care of her aging parents, the artist didn’t have a lot of time to devote to painting. She did set up a studio in Chicago and took classes at the Art Institute and the Palette & Chisel Art Academy, where, she said, Clayton Beck, a portrait artist, “really taught me a lot about portraiture.
Before then, I’d painted this and that, including still lifes, but my interest in portraiture really began in earnest in Chicago when I started going to that class.”
Back in New York, the couple took summer rentals on the East End for several years before buying their home in Sag Harbor in 2016. “I started doing mostly seascapes when I began to paint out here,” Ms. Eisenberg said. “I loved doing them, and I found they were successful, people actually like to buy seascapes. But at this stage in my life I don’t want to conform or confine myself to just doing one thing. I really wanted to just do everything and experiment with different genres.”
With the onset of the pandemic, as lives powered down and people were confined to their domestic spaces, Ms. Eisenberg was drawn to still life. She commented that many people, especially when thinking of the Dutch and Flemish still life paintings of the 17th century, remark on the opulence. “You have so much to look at in those paintings, so much going on, so much symbolism. I wanted to distill the still life into something that is quiet and simple and yet still has some of the elements of the traditional still life.”
One such element is memento mori, the use of symbolic objects meant to remind the viewer of the transience of life. In some of Ms. Eisenberg’s paintings, drooping branches and leaves, shriveled or fallen onto a pedestal, are designed to serve that function.
Most of the works at Guild Hall depict vases of flowers or branches on pedestals placed against monochromatic, minimal backgrounds. One, “Mexico,” is a simple plate of oranges on a black table with a gray background. When a visitor remarked that it reminded him of Cezanne, she observed that Cezanne’s backgrounds are more elaborate.
(While it isn’t in the exhibition, she has created one still life of pears and apples with a more colorful Cezanne-esque background. Its title, “Paul Meets Martha,” is a nod toward the French painter and Martha Stewart.)
She sets up some of the still life arrangements in her studio, but also works from photographs. “Many of them I just create when I’m painting them,” she said. “I’m creating the arrangement and the vase, and yet I’m capturing the beauty of the flowers or branches I’m putting in the painting from photographs I’ve taken.”
Her facility with the interplay of light and shadow makes some of the vases appear three-dimensional. One blue vase in particular seemed to almost pop from the canvas. The pedestals not only provide perspective but also have some texture from the brushwork.
“Painting is an act of discovery,” said Ms. Eisenberg. “You stand in front of a canvas, and it’s blank, and then you decide what you want to do. And you start, and it can be surprising when you apply a brushstroke on a canvas, and you get an effect you either did intend or had no intention of doing, but it looks so great that you keep it. Unlike watercolor, oil painting is more forgiving, and I need a lot of forgiveness when I paint.”
On the show’s wall label, Melanie Crader, Guild Hall’s director of visual arts, writes, “Capturing the timeless and universal qualities of still life, her spare paintings elevate her subjects, celebrating quiet simplicity and offering calm amid the clamor of contemporary life.”
Ms. Eisenberg and Ms. Crader will lead a tour of the exhibition on Sunday at noon. Tickets are $15, $13.50 for members.
