robert berlind’s second solo exhibition at lennon, weinberg is focused on a selection of paintings of trees, water and reflections. The water’s rippling surface provided him an opportunity to merge in these works both what lies below and the landscape above. Always an intuitive painter, he was drawn to subjects that were dynamic and unfixed, that challenged the acts of observation and painterly description. His interest in reflection and transparency began with a series of nighttime paintings when he settled in a Chelsea loft after receiving his MFA at Yale and a few years teaching at the Nova Scotia School of Art and Design in the early 1970s. Of those paintings, he said: I got into painting reflections in windows at night. And those were the first paintings I did in my studio, which then had the old windows so it was kind of an interesting reflection, looking through and painting the reflection at the same time. And it was clear by this time that my interest was really in probing perception itself and those situations where you see more than one thing at a time, like seeing through a window, seeing a reflection and seeing the window itself, you know? I thought how do you do that?1 When he later bought a home in the western Catskills, the natural setting of fields, woods, streams and ponds raised the same question. “For years, I looked at water surfaces, meditating on it, without thinking it was paintable or drawable. But I would look at the water, and it kept changing and moving and I could lose myself in that. You forget what you’re looking at and you forget who you are and you’re just there.”2 1. In Memoriam: Robert Berlind with Robert Kushner, The Brooklyn Rail, February 2016. 2. “What you Really See Is How You Are Looking”: Robert Berlind Interviewed by Elena Sisto, Artcritical.com, February 9, 2016.