It is a pleasure seeing the paintings by Richard Segalman at the Katharina Rich Perlow Gallery. Segalman is a realist painter, having studied with Raphael Soyer, with a long record of exhibitions shown throughout the United States for the past thirty years.

Known for his paintings of tall slender women wearing flowing cotton blouses and skirts, his models are placed in the interior of a room; a room filled with clothes of the luscious, lightweight cotton fabric. It's a woman's world of garments, beauty, color and light.

Segalman is a true painter, a man of the brush. You can sense his enjoyment in putting paint to canvas and his continued interest in rendering fabrics; soft, voluminous materials often in white. To add to the romantic quality of the scenes, Segalman will sometimes dress his model in a large floppy hat. Her features, however, are undefined, often in shadow. Only the clothes, and how they fold and drape on the woman's body are important.

It is no surprise that throughout his childhood, the artist was surrounded by fabrics and hats. His mother was a milliner. In the painting, "Costumes of Dreams," a slender woman in a pale yellow slip stands in the center of an abundance of garments in pastel blue, white, red and yellow. The canvas is packed with clothes that in and of themselves are formal images of the shimmer of light and color. It is possible, that Segalman's paintings are less amout women and more about painting the sensuality and richness of materials which he does masterfully.

In addition, Segalman exhibits small paintings of Coney Island. In these outdoor scenes of bathers, where light and dark play against one another, one can almost smell the salt air and feel the exhilaration of the ocean breeze.

Richard Segalman's exhibition was on view from October 6 through November 3, 2004.

Copyright © 2005 Hedy O'Beil