Scott Hewicker interviews painter Sydney Cohen about her work on the occasion of the exhibtion Sydney Cohen: Some Other Need at Right Window Gallery, 992 Valencia St., San Francisco, on view through May 31, 2013.

Hewicker writes that Cohen's paintings are "small to medium-large brilliantly colorful layered abstractions of oblique lyrical structures and spaces; each one a mini-world of intuitive and playful decision-making. Both highly worked and loosely executed, reveling in a vivid liquidity of poured textures and buoyant shapes… Hers is the kind of beautifully messy painterly abstraction that I enjoy so much but see little of these days with many young abstract painters leaning towards a forced distance of restraint with barely-there gestures of thin paint and labored conceptualized emptiness. Sydney’s painting refreshingly loped and careened wildly through a complex network of bright shapes and unhesitating gestures, pouring on layer after layer of strange color combinations into burrowing organic forms."