John Goodrich reviews Janice Nowinski: Paintings at John Davis Gallery, Hudson, New York, on view through June 18, 2017.

Goodrich writes: “In her third show at John Davis Gallery, Nowinski continues to combine a distinctly ‘low,’ unpolished approach with high ambitions for painting. The artist’s fairly conventional motifs — figures posed in landscapes and interiors — conceal a sophisticated orchestration of line and color. Despite her inelegant attack, with its coarse brushwork, abbreviated forms, and predilection for darkish, grayed green-blues, the paintings possess a kind of brute grace. In the strongest of them, the effect is truly striking: a straitened virtuosity that could arise only from a keen sensibility, a blunt honesty, and an impatience with the superficial.”