Though my meditation on Sally Gall’s new body of photography, which involves kites and clotheslines, is not about painting, nonetheless I must start there. I’m starting at that moment in art-historical time when photography usurped painting’s authority as arbiter of direct and verifiable observation.

I had not seen nor known of Matisse’s painting, The Windshield, until a few years ago. It is a painting depicting a landscape seen through the windshield of a car of a country road lined with trees. In the foreground, propped against the steering wheel, is a sketch pad.

For the last five years, working closely with art teacher Peter Solow, students studying photography at Pierson High School have been asked to create work that explores various photographic genres using Sag Harbor as their muse. The result of this exercise has culminated each year in a juried exhibition called Sag Harbor in Focus, which has been shown at various venues in the Village (Dodds & Eder, the Whaling Museum, the John Jermain Library).

Painting is a language. Besides being seen, it is meant to be read and to be felt.

As a painter, I have to believe that everything that I put into a work will be transmitted to people who experience the painting in the flesh, so to speak.

It’s the look - the look in her eyes. It’s not a stare but it is direct. It is perceptive, even penetrating. It shows her to be a conscious being capable of scrutinizing the world as the world scrutinizes her. She does not smile. She demonstrates no need to mollify us. She knows she is looking and she knows that she is being looked at. She knows that the camera is the gateway to a subsequent anonymous audience of countless lookers whom she cannot see but knows will be there, looking at her in the future. She knew you would look. She knows that the looking will never stop. It’s part and parcel of the work that day, on those rocks, in that bathing costume, under that sky, in front of those waves.

After Martha Graham Dance Company's residency at The Church in February, 2021, Eric Fischl offered this reflection on their work and the state of the body in art.