Iconic Borenstein Painting a Symbol of Achievement
August 30, 2017
In Sam Borenstein (1978), Rosshandler and Kuhns write about “la vieille école,” the old school house on Lac Brulé, a few miles from Ste. Lucie, which the Borenstein’s rented as their Laurentian cottage and ultimately purchased. They explain that in the period of the 1960s, "Borenstein achieved a fresh exuberance - the tumult and exhilaration he had been reaching towards for decades emerged, his paintings burst with gusting energies, which it seemed he had tapped for the first time. Perspective, scale, line, and form, the rudiments he had mastered over thirty years of painting, became seething, elusive elements of a tumultuous vision: a storming of whites and blues, in which a familiar landscape ripple, quaked, and roared from within. His landscapes became portraits of a force as elemental as his own urge to paint; landforms, trees, buildings, and streets, were whipped into a hurricane of colour, fixed somehow painfully, somehow exuberantly, to the canvas. Borenstein's work reached the zenith of intuition and technique he had struggled with for thirty years, and at the age when most artists begin to ease and relax, Borenstein worked more fervidly, more excitedly than he had ever worked before. His confidence in himself, never doubted but never so certain, became a further prod." (p. 62).
