Doris Pontieri "I have a single answer to the many questions that you have asked about my work and my life: One is born to be free." Doris Pontieri’s response to my pedantic, probing queries was disarming instinctive, lapidary, and intuitive. For arguments sake I retorted that freedom could be redefined only in terms of restriction. And the artist’s prompt reply was: "In fact, the canvas’ edges are my restrictions." This is Doris’ world, an uncontrolled expanse of texture, colour and freedom of expression.

Born and raised in Toronto, where she completed her post-secondary education at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute majoring in psychology, Doris has been on the art scene since she was conceived - her mother, Barbara Allison, was an accomplished artist of her own right. Always interested in the visual arts she began to cultivate her talent at eighteen and her passion for painting hasn’t waned ever since.

Steeped in the Canadian tradition, the subject matter of her artwork has been landscapes and flowers. But it is in the latter that she has dedicated most of her artistic life and freedom of expression. Her floral work is well balanced and spontaneous, but with an eye for effect rather than composition. The result is an effusion of texture in which the figurative is drawn into the receding abstract background. This elicits from our perception an immediate two-way dialogue with the artwork, both on a visual and intellectual level. In fact, on first impact the viewer unmistakably focuses on the easily recognized topos: the flower. But upon finer scrutiny, the abstract element emerges subtly and uncontrollably requiring from the observer a reconstruction of the whole painting as a unit and as an integral part of her/his personal experiences. This mesmerizing effect is subtly achieved in the Last Dance. The wilting sunflowers (thus the title Last Dance; life’s last dance in the sun, in the heyday of life) are immediately recognized by the viewer for their size and rotundity and our visual perception has no qualms about the image. It is the intriguing background that gradually grips the eye and set our mind in motion to rearrange, to recognize and to reconstruct the visual in relation to the intellectual and thus creating forms, images, visions and meaning.

Doris’ personality and femininity is a mark of her gender that has found freedom of expression into the floral world. However, in the history of fine arts, all male artists have tried their hand at floral compositions – the French artist Henri Fantin-Latour, a friend and supporter of Manet, was very much admired as a flower painter. But few have achieved the sublimity of female artists, of who Georgia O’Keefe is the best example in our century. Doris’ work has an inkling of the profundity of the great American artist and a zest for the contemporary. Her floral paintings are, as Alfred Stieglitz remarked about O’Keefe’s work, "the purest, finest, sincerest things, that I have seen in a long time."