Exhibition Reviews

Connie smith Siegel is an artist of marvelous serenity. She is a great technician and a major spirit. You feel at once on entering the gallery that this is not just work with paint and canvas, but genuine proof of the hope that humanity can be a peace with the world.

—– Alfred  Frankenstein, San Francisco Chronical

Connie Smith Siegel’s exhibition is a visual treat that refreshes the spirit as well as the eye. Siegel not only enhances our appreciation of the place where we live:  she subtly, though authoritatively, makes us marvel at her ability to recreate the total feeling of place through painting beautiful surfaces.

When people in the future view Siegel’s paintings and try to understand how we saw our environment and what we felt about it, they’ll envy us.

—- Robert MacDonald, Artweek

Siegel’s philosophy is a simple one that reminds us of the spiritual insights conveyed by a painterly sense of space. The artist is keenly aware of the tenets of the modernist tradition, and in keeping with them, her naturalism has an underlying abstract structure that strengthens the depiction of her subject matter.

—– Andre Mareshal Workman, San Francisco Chronicle

Connie Smith Siegel is showing paintings of the landscape around Bolinus and Tomales Bay, nicely balancing stark, flat shapes with the softening effect of greyed, overcast tonalities and softly stroked oil and acrylic.

—– Thomas Albright, San Francisco Chronicle

Connie Smith Siegel presents works which have come from concrete observation, yet at the same time demonstrate a kind of passion for shape and spatial relationships in their own right. The effect of the work goes beyond the specific and conveys a more universal, serence and spiritual prescence of nature, a presence not so much observed, but participated in.

—– Beverly  Cassell, Artweek

Connie Smith Siegel’s painting is about the beauty of unspoiled nature. Not just nature in general but specific sections of landscape which have special meaning for the artist. However the approach is pure and coming from within, uninfluenced by current or past trends in painting—universal in the strength and the power conveyed.

—– Phylis Bragden, Marin Independent Journal