Lady with Corsage, depicts a woman with her hair neatly tied up in a bun. Her hands are held together in front and she wears a dress. The overall impression is of formality. There is a frailty and grim atmosphere despite this woman's festive attire. Red paint stains the representation on her chest. We sense some painful experience has marked this woman at another time. The emptiness that surrounds her is compositionally exaggerated and dark muted tonalities project a feeling of insurmountable unhappiness. Girl in Schoolyard has a solemn alignment of eleven girls who stand in rows. It has a strange admixture of delightful decorative flower motifs in its lower section. Are the girls singing, praying or playing? The scene is charged with a cool serenity. These girls seem almost too aware of themselves, as if prematurely grown up. The space that surrounds them is claustrophobic, haunting, seems to impinge on these children. The background has unreal circular and squarish motifs.

In Couple in Westmount, a middle-aged man in suit and tie sits in an armchair while his wife stands next to him. The curtains, the flowers, the tables, and assorted wall and decorative elements are denuded and distorted, and the colours seem exaggerated. The piece has an implicit expressionist angst and distorted angularity that is a paraphrase for the unreality of the world these people exist in, as if the couple's situation were beyond their control. Lady with Compact has that same exaggeration, and distortion of space. The surface painterly treatment and coloration are almost existential, as if life itself were a secret, an elusive admixture of fact and fantasy. Real compositional features are rendered in a complex and highly personal and personable way in Sisters in Gallery. The drab decor of the setting is mirrored in the somewhat resigned, near identical facial expressions and bodily stance of the two sisters. The only gesture of freedom or escape from this gloomy atmosphere is evidenced in the brief flourish of colour in the carpet edging on the floor, rendered in a freehand gestural way. Bridesmaids again extends this private inner world of the artist, while Lady at Mirror shows a woman looking in at an embellished oval mirror, as if seeing herself in some abstract and benign future scenario. The woman who looks out from an inner space we cannot look into or define in Woman at Doorway again suggests a hidden history. Her inner world will never be revealed or exposed to anyone in its entirety...

A basic awareness of the passing of time, of an uncertain destiny is enhanced by a sublime texturally dense surface treatment in Shirley Katz's works on paper. We do not know what experiences have brought this frenzied sense of drama to the subjects Katz depicts. The configurations and situations may vary but the one constant is the space within which they are presented. Light and dark effects, surface tensions and pictorial details all contribute to the final composition. The works that truly succeed as portraits are often those where gestural and surface treatment are left to develop into a private language of expression as, for instance, in the intense psychologically charged atmosphere of Three Bridesmaids or Brothers in White Shirts. The penetrating intensity of expression, visually embraced in Katz's depictions of the facial universe of her subjects is evenly matched by a taught compositional unity and composure.

Childlike and naive, yet rich in psychological intensity, Canadian Gothic, Just Married, Girl Skipping, and Girl on Swing, are Shirley Katz at her best, building an idiosyncratic language out of a magic and surreal childlike vision. Everything becomes an intense visual feast of vernacular and naive popular expression. This visual universe we discover is marred by ever so slightly humoristic yet real details and tinged with a light touch of Katz's almost absurd affection for the ordinary. Other portraits such as At Graumann's and Woman in Shawl are presented on wholly neutral backgrounds. Here Katz advances her art into a pure aesthetic of portrait composition using surface pastel effects and composition device. Unusual allegories can be found Katz's Pop art influenced depictions of shoes, jackets and shirts portrayed in empty spaces or on clothes hangers.

Drawing people, capturing their expressions, bodily composure, and presenting an atmosphere at once estranged from and a reflection of their personality, Shirley Katz seizes her subject at one moment in time. A strange effect results where the artist's own interpretation fuses with that of the individual figure subject. We read into the subject in a way comparable to how we read an account or characterization of a person in a novel.

While human portraiture is often forgotten in the contemporary arts melée of concepts, ideas, and dogmas in art we are bombarded with daily, Montreal-based artist Shirley Katz has dedicated herself almost uniquely to portraying the intricacies of the human figure. Since the early 1990s, Katz has turned her attention to making intimate large-scale pastel portraits. Using bold outlining, chiaroscuro, muted colouring and textural effects, Katz captures the personal idiosyncrasies, the markings of experience that are part of each person she depicts. Frozen in time, these personages are neither beauty queens or idealized Adonis', but instead everyday people. The marks of their personal experience emerge amid the details, in the facial expressions, the bodily gestures and neutral backgrounds that go to make up each portrait. The expressions are reflective, and reveal their inner psychology, which is a kind of personalized modern day mythology. Caught in a moment in time they seem equally aware of the passing of time.

In her endearing portrait of Margaret, Shirley Katz presents with great sensitivity and subjective response, a portrait of a woman who has lived much of her life, and is reflecting on it. Her face tells a million and one stories. We know none of them. Anita is an unpretentious, and fully mature portrayal of a middle-aged woman. Here, the eyes, the mouth and bodily composure of this woman reveal an essential modesty of depiction. She could be from anywhere, could be anyone, yet she is also one person who carries her worldly experience in the fleshy details of her face and body. The Pink Chair has nobody in it, and is almost like an anatomy of portraiture, for there is no subject but the pink chair. The chair maintains its own presence all on its own. Is this artists portrait of her own invisible muse?

Jeff with Outstretched Arm fully develops compositional effects in the subtle detailing of the fabric folds, couch and crouched body of a man in shorts who looks off into the distance. Other nude portraits are uncompromising in their bold depiction of middle-aged women, some depressed, others distraught, still others composed and accepting of their destiny and situation. These portraits reveal an essential humanity that we seldom see in a world where advertising presents the ideal woman as unblemished, beautiful. There is no such erasure of the effects of time and experience in Shirley Katz's portrayal of women and men. Their real states of being and specific characteristics should be celebrated for the uncompromising honesty of their depiction. In portraying these figures, who we do not know, Shirley Katz presents us with a mirror into our own soul, of how we feel, live, are...

Not all of it is delectable, and much of it is painfully honest, but each of these pictures tells a story. As Katz states: "I draw the human form because it offers an infinite range of gestures and expressions: each one of these offers the opportunity to discover or invent new surfaces."

Shirley Katz's portraits reveal their subjects in various states of response, relaxation, introspection, reflection. Shirley Katz produces portraits with an endearing sense of the inherent personality of each subject, not as others see them, but as she sees them. These people's bodies are truly drawn from life, and reflect their individual spirits and persona with an uncompromising sense of the moment in time. What we do not see as much as what is there, plays a role in Shirley Katz's penetrating art of portraiture. Light enters into and illuminates the art, and the artists spirit and that of her subject fuse in this process of drawing from life.