QUOTES ABOUT THE WORKS OF SAM BORENSTEIN

"His intensely hued and emotionally charged views of the city and its surrounding countryside earned Borenstein the title of Canada's only 'authentic Expressionist'."
Franklin Einspruch, writer and artist, New York Sun, today's art pick for April 22 2011.

"... his go-for-broke swashbuckling approach to pigment and colour ... Borenstein repeatedly beams us back to the present with his superb visual pyrotechnics."

"This show, which will travel to other parts of Canada, should give Borenstein's oeuvre a new found artistic solidity when it comes to reputation ... Borenstein shows himself as a truly gifted and inspired Montreal painter. "
Henry Lehmann, Art Critic, The Montreal Gazette, July 30, 2005.

“All is alive with lickety-thick colours that could only be fed to the canvas by someone who has an appetite for life. The houses lean into the curve of the road like fingers curling toward a palm, and the sky slants down to their rooftops in an exchange of energy. The scene shows that heaven and houses, holy and human, are a single miraculous organism.”
Heather Solomon, Canadian Jewish News, June 2005.

“He leapt over the barriers of poverty, lack of formal schooling, and cultural isolation to create a body of work that is personal yet universal, original yet accessible, worldly yet spiritual, frozen in time yet boiling with movement. Borenstein has painted places and people that held a resonance for him, and in so doing he has anchored the ephemeral.”
Joan Murray, author, 2001

“You could hang a Borenstein next to a Vlaminck, a Dufy or a Van Gogh even, but not next to the art that Canadians often collected in the fifties and sixties”
Walter Klinkhoff, Walter Klinkhoff Gallery, interview for film, 1990

“An inner tension, a below the surface pressure, seems to be active in the landscape, as if an earthquake were in the making.”
Leo Rosshandler, author, Sam Borenstein: His Life and Work, McClelland and Stewart, 1978

“…the oils have been smeared, stropped, splayed and scooped by the palette knife, twisted just so, and left to dry into a rough swirl that conveys the most subtly observed form.”
William Kuhns, author, Sam Borenstein: His Life and Work, McClelland and Stewart, 1978

“ … pigment laid on with a trowel, but expertly laid.”
Robert Ayre, Art Critic, The Montreal Star, 1966