Continuing through March 19, 2026
In 2020, after the Covid-19 pandemic struck, the Canadian-born painter Elaine Coombs, known for her verdant lyrical landscapes, found herself increasingly attracted to the sky as seen from her apartment window and on walks in San Francisco’s Presidio. Her feeling for nature found new subject matter in the clouds of the Bay Area, famed for its clear, sharp light, and a new, more colorful palette suggested by the warm light of sunrise and sunset, the golden hour favored by many photographers and painters.
Coombs found support for this new interest in the spiritual writing of Eckhart Tolle, who in “A New Earth” advises his readers to examine how excessive ego and competitiveness — both ceaselessly inculcated in consult culture — have transformed life into a constant race of unfulfilled getting and spending: he who dies with the most toys wins, as the 1980s joke credo went. The ego has a fear of losing the status rat race and tries to compensate by constant acquisition.
Tolle’s symbolic view of a flower as an enlightened stage in the life of a plant resonated with Coombs, who saw the sky anew both as nature’s sumptuous light show and a universal symbol of transcendence — or “Presence,” to employ the title of Coombs’ show. In “War and Peace,” Leo Tolstoy’s protagonist, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, avid for military glory, is wounded at the 1805 battle of Austerlitz, and gazes upward, from the grass to discover, near death (he supposes), the miracle of the infinite: “There was nothing over him except the sky. the lofty sky … with great clouds slowly sweeping across it … How is it I haven’t seen this lofty sky before?”
Artists are connoisseurs of “the beauty in the everyday,” to quote Coombs, echoing the first sharp observer of cloudscapes, the English landscapist, John Constable, who made copious notes on time and weather conditions that remain fascinating to modern nephologists (cloud scientists). Still, he was able to transform his acute, detailed perceptions into vessels laden with emotion: “Painting is but another word for feeling,” he declared, stalwart of the Romantic movement that he was.
“Presence” is comprised of fourteen paintings, half of them large, half mid-sized, all executed during the last year. Based on photographs taken by the artist, predominantly in the Bay Area, the works reflect the open, infinite space of Abstract Expressionism, and dispense with the clear linear structure of her older works. Space is implicitly extended indefinitely beyond the paintings’ borders.
They also convey the influence of Impressionism, specifically Monet’s “Water Lilies,” with the clouds, dotted here and there in the manner of Monet’s vegetation, but without trying to imitate his heavy impasto. Coombs instead favors carefully modulated, oblong palette-knife touches suggestive of cracked dried mud, fish scales, clusters of polygonal bubbles, and cell structures. We read microcosmic/macrocosmic paintings like “Precious (pink pearl multi),” “Rarefied (blue pearl multi),” “Majesty (gold),” and “Paradox (gold multi)”as unified wholes. Viewed more closely, in detail, we read them as patches or islands. Their focus constantly shifts in and out without ever resolving into a single fixed image. This ambiguity is enhanced by Coombs’ use of metallic/pearlescent hues — gold, silver, pink, and blue. The effect is that the flat skies behind the bas-relief clouds change in value — and possibly in hue as well, depending on the surroundings — as we alter our viewing position.
If the sky has been a subject for poetic interpretation from the time of Constable and Turner through that of Ryder and Stieglitz, it remains a viable subject for aesthetic and spiritual epiphanies, even, perhaps especially, in the current fearful culture of conquest.
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