One afternoon in July 2023, the painter and writer Julia Felsenthal, her husband, and their two dogs took their small motor boat into Pleasant Bay, on Cape Cod. A deep fog descended, and for four hours they puttered around in the eerie abyss. They couldn’t see much past their own boat, and for a brief period they were genuinely lost.
“Mostly it was interesting, and at times it was a little scary,” says Felsenthal, who now splits her time between Brooklyn and the Cape. She took hundreds of pictures on her phone, capturing the fuzzy, shifting light as it hit the water. “I had this very externalized sense of having put myself in a situation that made me uncomfortable, and needing to interrogate it, and exist within it, and use it.”
About a week later, Felsenthal began to paint those disorienting hours at sea, aided by her many photographs. It was a psychological exploration as much as an artistic one—an almost obsessive return over the course of a year and a half to the same four hazy hours. There was an undeniable parallel between the atmospheric murk and her own uncertainty about the future. She wondered: “Could something productive come out of this perseverating about a very specific moment in time that you can never get closer to, you will always be moving farther away from?”
The 24 paintings that resulted from this inquisition make up “Low Visibility,” Felsenthal’s second solo show at JDJ gallery in Manhattan, on view now through February 1. The paintings, all watercolors, take turns at serenity and dread. Some are dappled with piercing blues and greens—dreamy swirls that make you want to jump right in. Others, shrouded in grays and yellows, cast an ominous pall. The water churns and stabilizes, as it tends to do throughout a day. Taken together, these 24 paintings get at the uncanny experience of time as both fleeting and eternal: an afternoon that never ends in a day gone before you know it.
