Review
November 15, 2021
Laura Berendsen’s Equines at Bev’s Fine Art/The Centerpiece Gallery, Raleigh, NC

October 13th is the second opening at Bev’s Fine Art/ The Centerpiece Gallery that I have attended for Laura Berendsen…of course I often see her work posted online. However, in the many in-the-flesh visual encounters of art that I experience here and there, Berendsen’s abstract paintings continue to be engagingly positive. Her most recent exhibit features horses painted in her abstract signature style. The equine motif is a favorite theme for the artist. 
In this exhibit Berendsen’s horses range from pictorially controlled to wide open action painting. Both sensibilities achieve good things to see, good painting and a mental invitation to enjoy the ride. In the artist’s more controlled paintings, one titled The Sublime Generosity is Coming, with quotation from the mystic Rumi, pictorial shapes are in-filled with freely improvised brushwork, pattern, and graphic detail. In others, one Rumi quote-titled Knock and Joy Will Open, an evident free and open approach with wild color brushwork expands our attention to the edges of her larger canvases…where she then reins in her pictorial shape…the horse. [unintended pun].

Berendsen has stated how since childhood she has been obsessively drawing horses and as a mature painter sees the horse as a universal image...a starting or finish point for the painting. Realized in outline, silhouette, and scale, she portrays her horses standing to emphasize their timeless monumentality. She skillfully achieves moments of visual rest in her “wilder” color and brushwork with the stabilizing familiarity of the horse subject. All in all, Berendsen generously balances art and deeper emotional conception with her equines. 
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Everett Mayo
North Carolina Wesleyan College: Professor of Art; Curator of College Collections and Director of Galleries; Director/Curator Four Sisters Gallery of Self-Taught Visionary Art and the Robert Lynch Collection of Outsider Art.