Cool Blue, Harriet Silverstein, 2024, oil on canvas, 20 x 24 in. / 50.8 x 60.96 cm.

Expressive Landscapes and Living Light by Harriet Silverstein

January 1, 2026 Gavin Coates

Featured image: Cool Blue, Harriet Silverstein, 2024, oil on canvas, 20 x 24 in. / 50.8 x 60.96 cm.

Harriet Silverstein’s recent works explore landscape not as a fixed place, but as a living field of energy shaped by light, movement, and emotion.

Harriet Silverstein is a painter known for expressive landscapes that merge abstraction, vivid color, and dynamic mark-making to convey light, movement, and emotional atmosphere.

Across Upstate Mountain, Tropical Landscape 6, and Illuminated Garden, Silverstein uses expressive mark-making and layered color to translate the felt experience of nature rather than its literal appearance. These paintings hover between abstraction and recognition, inviting viewers to sense atmosphere, rhythm, and vitality as primary subjects.

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Upstate Mountain, Harriet Silverstein, 2025, mixed media on canvas, 12 x 12 in. / 30.48 x 30.48 cm.

In Upstate Mountain, the composition opens into a spacious terrain defined by sweeping linear gestures and shifting planes of green and blue. The mountain form emerges through movement rather than contour, as brushstrokes pull the eye diagonally across the surface. Atmospheric depth is built through layered color and directional energy, creating a balance between calm expansiveness and underlying force. The result is a landscape that feels both grounded and in flux, echoing the dual sensations of stillness and power found in nature.

Tropical Landscape 6, Harriet Silverstein, 2018, mixed media on paper, 46 x 59 in. / 116.84 x 149.86 cm.

Tropical Landscape 6 intensifies this relationship between light and vitality. Here, dense shadows collide with saturated color, producing a pulsing visual rhythm across the surface. Expressive strokes carve through the composition, suggesting foliage, heat, and sunlight without settling into fixed forms. The scale and richness of the palette amplify the sense of immersion, as if the viewer is enveloped by the scene. Light becomes an active presence, radiating, refracting, and animating the landscape from within.

Illuminated Garden, Harriet Silverstein, 2025, oil on canvas, 12 x 12 in. / 30.48 x 30.48 cm.

By contrast, Illuminated Garden compresses this energy into a more intimate field. Bold, spontaneous gestures scatter across the canvas, with bright primary colors evoking sunlight breaking through a dense garden. Rather than depicting specific plants or space, the painting captures the sensation of light touching the earth, fleeting, uplifting, and alive. The surface feels immediate and intuitive, emphasizing color as an emotional force rather than a descriptive tool.

Taken together, these works articulate a central theme of nature as an energetic system shaped by light, movement, and perception. Silverstein’s landscapes are less about where we are and more about how it feels to be there. Through expressive abstraction, she transforms familiar environments into vibrant, luminous experiences that celebrate the living pulse of the natural world.

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