For Wilbur Niewald, to paint is to question the visible: to adjust and re-adjust with each brushstroke relationships of color and drawing until an intuitively felt sense of “rightness” is achieved.  His painting heighten our awareness, inviting our eye to travel around and through the composition, buoyed by the clarity of the light and the transcendent beauty of color, closely observed.  Tempered by the 20th century conventions of abstraction, his vision connects the past with the present – not as a pastiche or an appropriation – but as an affirmation of contemporary sensibility.  This retrospective exhibition covered a period of 53 years.  What we as viewers sense throughout is Wilbur Niewald’s uncompromising engagement with the act of painting.  Although he has exhibited widely, and recognition has come his way, the prevailing passion and motivation for him has always been found in the work itself.