Raphael Rubinstein blogs about the work of painter Shirley Jaffe.

Rubinstein writes: "Shirley Jaffe emerged from the crucible of gestural abstraction with an approach to painting that has given her maximum formal freedom within fairly constant material conditions. A smooth-edge (rather than hard-edge) painter, she fills each one of her canvases with arrays of flat, discontinuous shapes (geometric, biomorphic, linear, allusive, ideal, familiar, eccentric, graceful, clunky) in which the color experiments of classic 20th century abstraction are pushed to new levels of creative discord and strange harmony. Frequently inspired by momentary glimpses of urban landscapes, or visual memories, her paintings undergo a long process of correction and adjustment as shapes change contour and color, or disappear completely, until absolute autonomy and tight choreography coincide."