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One afternoon in July 2023, the painter and writer Julia Felsenthal, her husband, and their two dogs took their small motor boat into Pleasant Bay, on Cape Cod. A deep fog descended, and for four hours they puttered around in the eerie abyss. They couldn’t see much past their own boat, and for a brief period they were genuinely lost.
“Mostly it was interesting, and at times it was a little scary,” says Felsenthal, who now splits her time between Brooklyn and the Cape. She took hundreds of pictures on her phone, capturing the fuzzy, shifting light as it hit the water. “I had this very externalized sense of having put myself in a situation that made me uncomfortable, and needing to interrogate it, and exist within it, and use it.”
About a week later, Felsenthal began to paint those disorienting hours at sea, aided by her many photographs. It was a psychological exploration as much as an artistic one—an almost obsessive return over the course of a year and a half to the same four hazy hours. There was an undeniable parallel between the atmospheric murk and her own uncertainty about the future. She wondered: “Could something productive come out of this perseverating about a very specific moment in time that you can never get closer to, you will always be moving farther away from?”
The 24 paintings that resulted from this inquisition make up “Low Visibility,” Felsenthal’s second solo show at JDJ gallery in Manhattan, on view now through February 1. The paintings, all watercolors, take turns at serenity and dread. Some are dappled with piercing blues and greens—dreamy swirls that make you want to jump right in. Others, shrouded in grays and yellows, cast an ominous pall. The water churns and stabilizes, as it tends to do throughout a day. Taken together, these 24 paintings get at the uncanny experience of time as both fleeting and eternal: an afternoon that never ends in a day gone before you know it.
Felsenthal, a self-taught painter, pulls inspiration more from literature than the macho seascapes of art history. The Odyssey lends structure to the sequence of “Low Visibility” and titles to some of its works (the bleak but beautiful The Acheron references a river Odysseus encounters in the Underworld). And, of course, the application of a hero’s journey onto a single day where nothing really happens calls to mind another tome: Joyce’s Ulysses.
“My journey to becoming a painter goes through my long history as a writer and an English major,” Felsenthal says. She spent the first 15 years of her career as a culture writer and editor in book and magazine publishing (including at Vogue). Painting was more of a hobby, one she’d had since childhood. Then the pandemic happened. She and her husband left the city for Cape Cod, and her freelance writing assignments dried up. Here was her opportunity to take art from side gig to center stage—but what to paint? She was no longer surrounded by other people, who had up to that point been her main subject.
So she took on her new surroundings: “I became very obsessed with this process of trying to depict water—mostly because I couldn’t rationally understand how to do it,” she says. (Though she was new to depicting it, water itself was not an unfamiliar force: In 2012, during Hurricane Sandy, the Red Hook home she shared with her husband filled with eight feet of water.)
Felsenthal had already made some clear-sky sea paintings by the time the fog rolled in on that July day in Pleasant Bay. Her first solo show at JDJ was closing soon, and figuring out what to paint next without repeating herself filled her with dread. “Which impulses were the right impulses? How would I ever know how to know?” she writes in her artist’s statement.
The stakes felt heightened given a past health scare and her mid-career pivot from writer to painter. “Most people I know are buckling into their careers, and I was trying to take a hard left turn,” she tells me. As it was happening, she didn’t know her time on the boat would inspire her next painting project, but she did know that an afternoon of disquiet was something to lean into. Out in the mist, unmoored but immersed, an idea started to percolate.
There’s something deeply human about these paintings. They are quiet but willful, with a vantage point just above the water’s surface. The largest work is Lashed to the Mast, a nod to Odysseus’s plan to hear the sirens’ call without being lured to his death. The painting is possessed of an eyes-wide-open boldness: a vulnerable position for an inherently “risk-averse” and “very cautious” person, as Felsenthal described herself to me.
She applies her watercolors, often thought of as dainty or for kids, in such a physical way that the paint takes on an uncharacteristic heftiness. Atop extra-thick paper Felsenthal layers the paint into precise lurches, not unlike Vija Celmins’s graphite oceans. She’ll even scrape away paper using an X-Acto knife. “I’m wrestling with these,” she says. It’s a method, however unconventional, particularly suited to getting at the murkiness of life, when you’re ruminating on a question with no clear answer.
“I’m really interested in this credit we give to photography as truly documenting anything. Because I look at the photographs of that day, and I’m like, That doesn’t really look like what it looked like,” she says, before gesturing to the work in front of us. “This does.”
“Low Visibility” is on view at JDJ gallery in New York City until February 1, 2025.