Jocelyn Fine, Until We Meet Again, Sarah Shepard Gallery

Jocelyn Fine, Until We Meet Again, acrylic and crayon on canvas, 56 x 52 inches.

November 6 - December 20, 2025

By Kelly Jean Egan

Stepping into Sarah Shepard Gallery, the first thing you notice is how the room itself seems to step back. Its stark white walls and bright, natural lighting create a kind of visual hush, a deliberate neutrality that lets Jocelyn Fine’s paintings command the space on their own terms. Color radiates more boldly in this setting; her saturated fields and layered gestures seem to rise off the canvas, gaining a clarity that would be unlikely in a busier setting. The exhibition brings together ten works from 2023-2025, each revealing a different facet of Fine’s evolving language of memory, movement, and landscape. Organized in partnership with 3Walls, a Brooklyn advisory and pop-up space known for spotlighting rising artists, the show has the feeling of a quietly confident debut, thoughtfully framed and deeply attentive to the subtleties of Fine’s practice.

Jocelyn Fine installed at Sarah Shepard Gallery, photo courtesy of www.sarahshepardgallery.com.

Fine works in a mode that hovers between abstraction and the organic, building images that feel rooted in the natural world without ever depicting it outright. Rather than painting a specific place or scene, she turns to abstraction as it allows her to translate sensations like memory, intuition and bodily rhythm into form. Her canvases operate like emotional landscapes, shaped less by what the eye records and more by what the body remembers; the emotions that we do not choose to retain but are often thrust upon us through no doing of our own. By avoiding literal representation, Fine gives herself the freedom to follow movement, atmosphere, and inner logic, creating works that invite viewers to sense rather than simply peruse, to feel their way through color and gesture as if navigating a terrain that is both familiar and newly discovered.

Jocelyn Fine, Even The City Has Stars, acrylic and crayon on canvas, 54 x 64 inches.

Fine builds these emotional terrains through a vocabulary of biomorphic shapes, drifting planes of color, and marks that feel guided as much by instinct as by intention. Her palettes often unfold in layered waves, soft peaches and minerals in one painting, deeper violets and earthy greens in another, creating atmospheres that seem to shift and move as you stand before them. The compositions rarely settle into symmetry; instead, they feel lived-in and exploratory, with gestures that loop, stretch, collide, or taper off at the canvas edge like trails left by movement. There are echoes of Abstract Expressionism in her approach, yet Fine steers that lineage toward something quieter and more intimate, perhaps akin to what we see in early aboriginal art and later, Philip Guston’s pieces. Her shapes feel less like declarations and more like fragments of memory; impressions of moments the body has stored and slowly released onto the surface.

This sensibility comes into sharp focus in There’s So Much I Can’t Explain, a large acrylic and crayon painting that feels like a landscape assembled from memory’s flashbacks. Fine layers pinks, reds, and mineral blues into a scene that teeters between dream and terrain: a crescent moon hangs above floating clouds, while fields of berry-like marks and vertical fronds anchor the foreground. Yet nothing settles into certainty. The rounded blue forms at the horizon, the looping pink cluster to the right, even the darker arching shape tucked beneath the clouds—all read like silhouettes we glimpse after staring at something too long, the amalgamated shapes that imprint themselves behind our eyelids. Fine uses these half-remembered contours not as symbols but as emotional vessels, allowing the painting to operate like a recollection still forming. The result is a composition that feels at once exuberant and elusive, a place that seems to declare itself while simultaneously slipping back into the subconscious terrain from which it emerged.

Jocelyn Fine, There's So Much I Can't Explain, acrylic and crayon on canvas, 54 x 48 inches.

But Fine’s visual language is not defined only by abundance. Just as memory can arrive in flashes rather than full narratives, and just as nature often reveals its beauty through a single line of horizon or a lone shift of color, she also embraces a remarkable restraint. Some of her canvases quiet themselves down, relying on spacious fields, pared-back forms, and a deliberate stillness that feels almost architectural. These works remind us that clarity can be as affecting as complexity and that a painting does not need to brim with mark-making to carry emotional weight. In these more minimal compositions, Fine demonstrates an intuitive sense of balance and design: the confidence to let one gesture hold the room, to let a simplified shape or a softened edge speak with the same conviction as the denser, more exuberant works. It is in this oscillation between fullness and quiet that her range becomes most apparent.

That clarity is on full display in When Day Meets Night, a compact 25 x 25 inch canvas that condenses the language of landscape into a few decisive gestures. Here, Fine swaps the exuberant flurry of marks for broad, deliberate fields of color: a deep burgundy foreground, a band of shadowed black, and a pale, yellow-green form that curves gently across the composition like a dune or a shoreline seen in soft focus. Above it, the sky warms into a quiet gradient of peach and rose, pierced only by a single red sun. The painting feels reduced to essentials, yet nothing about it feels empty; instead, the simplicity becomes its source of power and quietly echoes the vastness of a surrealist world. Fine understands that a landscape can be felt in the body even when stripped of detail;  memory often returns as a shape, an aura of light or a horizon line rather than a full description. In this piece, the restraint heightens the emotional charge: a reminder that something can be striking, tender, and complete with almost nothing said at all.

Jocelyn Fine, When Day Meets Night, acrylic and crayon on canvas, 25 x 25 inches.

Fine’s educational path adds an under-recognized yet deeply significant layer to her painting practice. She holds an MS in Architectural Conservation from Columbia University and studied painting conservation in Florence. That experience with restoring surfaces, understanding the built environment’s layers of history, and observing how materials age and reveal traces of time, all reverberate in her works. Her canvases feel like fragile archaeological levels of memory and nature, where each gesture and hue carries the quiet weight of material history. This consciousness of surface, time, and sediment allows her to balance spontaneity with discipline.

Jocelyn Fine, It Doesn't Have to Be a Dream, acrylic and crayon on canvas, 54 x 64 inches.

Taken as a whole, Until We Meet Again offers a refreshing clarity of vision—an exhibition that feels both grounded and exploratory, confident yet still unfolding. The ten works remain on view at Sarah Shepard Gallery through December 20, and the space could not be better suited to them; its clean light and quiet architecture give Fine’s paintings room to breathe, revealing the full range of her sensibilities. What emerges is the portrait of an artist with remarkable promise, someone who listens closely to both her materials and her internal landscape. As Fine continues to refine her voice, it will be fascinating to see how her dialogue between gesture and restraint, memory and form, evolves. There is a sense that her work is only beginning to articulate everything it has to say.