Lisa Esherick’s keen eye for color and composition and her special talent for noticing life’s strange, riveting details are wonderfully affirmed in this current collection of artwork. Esherick’s paintings are sometimes composed as mini-stories, dramas that give expression to the vexing themes of contemporary life. Her figures act alone, or in some group situation, but the story remains anchored in the questions and anxiety of our age. In their moral choices, Esherick’s figures struggle on the cusp between self-seeking and some larger sense of belonging to the world. This crowded, human landscape—filled with uncertainty, dread, and pathos—is Esherick’s home, and her work is a kind of spiritual guide to our complicated, interwoven fates. There are, however, no answers in Esherick’s work, only questions.

It is the questions that concern Esherick the most. The paintings in this exhibit represent, in the largest sense, Esherick’s experience of looking, discovering, and questioning. Her process as a painter is to go deep enough with questioning until there’s no possibility of an answer one could repeat, define, or even precisely know. Instead of certainty, Esherick has taken a stand in the middle of uncertainty, because uncertainty is the only thing that has the rock solid feel of truth.

In much of her art, Esherick uses painting as a vehicle for investigating the stories that arise from questioning. Like all artists, she arrives at the conclusion that the story must be told in a certain way. A painting is, after all, an attempt to convey a certain perspective. It has no assumption of success and no ulterior motive, which makes it unique, a perspective on the teeming, busy landscape of contemporary life. Still lifes of subtly distorted kitchen tables, puppets, and masks, shadowy cityscapes at dusk, and the chaos of the San Francisco Bay Area’s freeway system are rendered as funny, quirky, and startling. Later, she adds other daily landscapes where divergent clusters of individuals are brought together in congested public places—overseas train depots in the clamor of midday, Russian casinos inhabited with Chekhovian characters, subways, casinos, mineral baths, and airports. There are also quiet paintings of landscapes that seem to vibrate on the canvas with an almost breathless veneration for things-as-they-are. These are scenes of the deepest mystery, and Esherick’s effort is to make us understand what she experiences as she contemplates them.

In her Travelling paintings Esherick does not travel the globe recording on canvas picturesque scenery or quaint local customs. The details on which she pauses would, in many cases, have been passed over by anybody else. In The Baths—Stuttgart VII a hearty woman, serene amid the chaos of a public pool, stands illuminated by incandescent winter light rising from the bottom of the water. In Cranes—Night, Bethlehem Steel Shipyard’s drydock looms in a glistening mass against the night sky. Rectangle-shaped towers climb above an array of pipes and grids that seem to come from nowhere and disappear into the gathering night. The value in these details is that they provide a luminous glimpse of how she saw the world—that is, through the prism of a highly developed sense of place and an unusually compelling inner landscape.

There are numerous ways to look at the work of Lisa Esherick. The paintings request our consideration as social commentary, as objects unto themselves, for their luminosity and composition, or for their human pathos. At the same time, Esherick’s work can be considered in terms of anthropology: her figures sometimes embody the realm of the liminal, a word derived from the Latin limen, meaning “threshold.” Anthropologist Victor Turner describes the liminal as a transitional quality essential to all rites of passage. The state of “being betwixt and between” is sometimes characterized as one where individuals forgo the usual restraints of gender and position. Issues of identity and status are provisionally set aside and individuals dwell in a state of openness, ambiguity, and uncertainty. Behavior once deemed aberrant or taboo is now overlooked. On the other hand, individuals may enter into a discipline or situation just as distant from their usual life.

Lisa Esherick is a painter of thresholds. In her art, something has happened or is about to happen; the act is implied but not illustrated. Yet in order to read the paintings, one has to participate, to admit, at least to oneself, that—yes—we have noticed. There is a well of uneasiness in the work, made all the more disquieting by the sometimes menacing relations between the figures. It is the way in which she forces the viewer to fill in the blanks, to answer the question, “What exactly is going on here?” It is the way Esherick subtly requires the viewers to call upon their own experiences, fantasies, and nightmares. It is the way she calls for us to stand in the middle of groundlessness and uncertainty.

We step almost literally into Lisa Esherick’s Train. It is two spaces simultaneously: a dining car with figures settled at tables, studying menus, reading, talking together and, beyond them, an intriguing countryside that, through the car’s windows, sails past unnoticed. Perhaps we’re struck by the girl in the foreground, camera to her face. She must be aiming it out the window that would be behind us, but for just a moment it seems that we ourselves have been noticed by a young voyeur nonchalantly watching eavesdroppers.

Train, painted in 1993, displays the elements that, in one form or another, come into play time and again in Lisa Esherick’s work: a narrative that arrests attention immediately and an adjunct reality, overlooked yet noteworthy for a beauty of its own. This interplay—which unfolds within the canvas and even extends beyond, as if anticipating a role in the scene for a viewer—also occurs in Metro and Venus/Louvre. Again, space is mediated by figures, but a part of it separately entices us to notice things that lie beyond the flurry of action. How marvelous the vaulted ceilings in the Louvre, we think; or the light across the countryside; or the ambiance of the Metro’s pointlessly high ceilings. All of these are ours to discover, and all pass unnoticed by the crowds.

These works anticipate the more ambitious synthesis of space and occupants in Esherick’s Casino series. The dense narratives of Money Moves/Irkutsk and The Gambler—Wiesbaden push into the entire canvas. Even so, it is not long before an unexpected detail snags our attention—a lone elderly woman making her way across the casino floor, clutching beets and a bag of potatoes; a dealer eyeing us surreptitiously. No! not us, but a woman standing at our shoulder. So many figures populate these canvases, each with its own preoccupations and perspective.

The human figure seldom appeared at all in Esherick’s early paintings. The images in her freeway series are busy with action, yet they have a vacant, architectural character akin to that of Edward Hopper’s landscapes. The freeway paintings portray —not people—but structures and machines: the things of people. Freeway I—To the City and Freeway IV—Con/Curve, both charcoal drawings, build their drama through compressed space and exaggerated perspective. Freeway—Hamm’s Curve and Freeway II—Chevron add emotionally charged colors. By the use of these expressionistic techniques, Esherick renders highly personal interpretations of simple unpopulated urban scenes.

These techniques also define her Urban Industrial Landscape images. View from Studio—Night, for example, and Towers, Stacks & Green portray a sleeping city alive with light and color. Exuding a quiet intimacy, these are less agitated than the freeway images. Perhaps the vacant landscapes and the dark of night led Esherick to introspection. Nonetheless, her characteristic juxtapositions continue to exert their influence. There is the telescoping of perspective in Still Life & City View, where a coffee pot looms large over a stairway in the distance. In Large Still Life, near objects are juxtaposed with what turns out to be not a view at all, but another of Esherick’s paintings. This casual jumbling of things that lie immediately at hand with what ought to be standing at a distance imparts a whimsicality in Esherick’s hands, even as it disturbingly leads the viewer to recollect an episode in a funhouse. It confirms her preoccupation with things overlooked, and with the potential of mere objects to assume psychological dimensions, which is to say a capacity for narrative.

This psychological dimension is captured forcefully in Lumber Mill—Oregon IV. The severely cropped composition gives the sense that Esherick did not so much stop painting at the borders as crash into them, as though, in beginning the piece, she had gauged the canvas to be substantially larger. The outcome is not a miniature but a brute, constricted chunk that generates claustrophobia and foreboding. Perhaps the windows seem too blankly black, the walls too unyielding about temperature or season or even time of day. It does not seem implausible to suspect the painting of concealing some aspect of itself from our scrutiny. The resulting tension calls to mind Esherick’s puppets.

The puppet paintings might initially be taken for still lifes: they are simple painterly studies of inanimate objects. Little King, for instance, is an unadorned composition that objectively portrays nothing more than a puppet and a water pitcher. Something New, however, reveals that Esherick’s intention is more ambitious than mere reportage. One puppet has reached out to grasp the arm of a fellow. Another is gesturing toward something offstage. Their stances, the exchange of meaningful glances, the facial features all transform mere painted heads into grotesque, leering beings caught in some awful act. Almost before we know it, we are wondering—just as we did in Train—who these people may be and what they are up to. They are not puppets at all, but portraits possessed of a very real and somehow sinister psychological aspect. Mute these figures are, but they cannot be said to be inanimate.

What is striking about both the puppet and urban paintings is that in so many ways they anticipate Esherick’s later commitment to human figures and narratives. It is clear that in painting these images she was refining techniques and cultural preoccupations upon which she would elaborate in the oversized canvases of the Casinos (1996–2003), Baths (1992–2002), China-Russia (1996–2006), and People Looking at Fish (2002–05) series. Today, Esherick is setting narrative into motion. Her every technique aims now to advance this. Where she perfected her techniques and focused her intentions, though, was in the puppet and urban images that now seem so distant from her more recent work.

The decision to paint extremely large pictures—Train is 60 × 120 in.—presented new challenges in the organization of space. Composition became dominant. Colors were now less expressionistic per se, instead contributing to specific narrative aspects. Esherick continues to distort perspective in the large paintings, however. We often find ourselves leaning over foreground heads even while staring straight across the room. In earlier works (Freeway IV—Con/Curve, for instance, or Something New) this was calculated to disorient the viewer, heightening tension. In the large canvases, Esherick seems to have something else in mind. If these paintings are to work, they must thwart our subconscious desire to take everything in without having to get too involved in details. This is achieved, in part, by the many visual distortions, which compel us to engage fully with the scene. The distortion undercuts our temptation to make a quick reading, to take in the whole and move on. The power of these images rests, after all, not in the whole but in the multitude of narrative glimpses and fragments. They no longer speak of single things but have evolved into freewheeling visual cacophonies.

Two recent works offer a measure of the distance Esherick has covered. The Crossing—Gare de L’Est, Paris is one. This is a dense, mural-like work. Its space, akin to that in Lumber Mill, has been crammed beyond its very borders, allowing for no visual roving. And whereas the earlier Metro offered streams of people for observation, The Crossing plunges us dramatically into the midst of individual characters. The one truly open space in the canvas actually serves to pin our eye to the silhouette of a vendor, preventing us from wandering too far from the seated man who is arguably the painting’s central figure. One consequence is to delay our encounter with the rather tantalizing man in the shadows at his back. Esherick’s little surprises no longer are delivered in the form of adjunct spaces that play counterpoint to the drama. They still are there to be discovered, but now we find them in other dramas tucked away outside the primary narrative.

The other work, which may be a harbinger of things to come, is On the Beach, finished as this piece was written. The exuberance, the noise, even the visual swarm of The Crossing are all absent. The mood of On the Beach is not exactly melancholic, but it is permeated with a pensiveness we have not encountered in Esherick’s previous travel images. The scene unfolds on a riverside beach in Russia’s St. Petersburg. Its muted blacks, whites, and grays are eerily lit by touches of red and purple. There is a feeling akin to twilight. In a sense, Esherick is reaching back into that mental space out of which she produced Lumber Mill and View from Studio. The tension encountered there is absent. In its place is something elusively mysterious. There is more than a hint of surrealism in the implication that perhaps nothing we see on this canvas—not the Mafia heads yakking into phones, not the ghost of Dostoevsky improbably shoving a wheelbarrow across the beach, not even the languid tossing of a ball—none of it may ever have occurred at all, except inside the painter’s own mind. Then, there it is again: a face pointing a camera in our direction. Improbably or not, we recognize familiar motifs. Again, we find ourselves peering across a stage on which figures play out their tales. Before long, just as the painter intended, we are caught up again in the watching, the listening, the musing.

Visual space and composition are again paramount in Esherick’s new paintings. In the early large works, it sufficed to situate her narratives within the context of larger pictorial spaces. This enticing interplay, though, did not satisfy her for long. At least since Irkutsk, the visual respite of a landscape passing through a window has been supplanted by increasingly complex dynamics of figures and space. Every corner of the stage now pushes the viewer back into the dramas. Every section of the canvas presents some new tale. None of this is divulged without ambiguity. The questions raised by the stories are never answered. We are forced to participate—to speculate—to interpret—on the basis of evidence that can never be confirmed. In a sense, Esherick’s paintings become explorations, the meaning of which we are left to resolve on our own.