Nicole Rudick remembers painter Jane Wilson (1924 – 2015) who passed away this week.

Rudick writes: "The strata of distant land in [Wilson's] paintings lie like silt at the bottom of a river and remind me of the colored stripes of earth in Malevich’s Red Cavalry. 'I have conquered the lining of the colored sky,' he once wrote. 'I have plucked the colors, put them into the bag I have made, and tied it with a knot.' Because Wilson’s big skies are so abstractly rendered, with only hints of land and wisps of clouds, they are more like hymns to color than representations of places. Her work has been compared to Mark Rothko’s clouds of color, but they also closely resemble Monet’s landscapes, if you removed the people, the haystacks, the boats, and the trees. They have all the variation and mood of a Turner painting, but none of the violent intensity, none of the outsize drama. James Schuyler characterized Wilson as 'the eclectic, cultivated artist, whose nineteenth-century hero is Delacroix.' I like the way Wilson herself once expressed the affinity: 'And Delacroix, Delacroix, Delacroix.'"