"These paintings capture the lake in a wide variety of climatic moods, and showcase Ms Last’s skill in the use of light and shadow and subtle tonal variations, making these works dynamic and lively and constantly interesting. They abstract the sense of power and force, not of the lake, but of the weather on this petulant body of water. Study #54 is a turbulent, moody piece, suggesting a confluence of dark forces, a battle of good versus evil, tranquility and turbulence balanced on a knife edge. Study #50 is equally dynamic and dramatic in its clash of forces, showing weather so violent it blurs sky and water and land - and blurs the line between representational and abstract art. These pieces are all numbered “studies”: The artist knows full well that she is trying to capture some tangible yet ephemeral moment that is the collision of her inner state and the lake conditions.
But in the most successful of these works she achieves the nearimpossible,capturing a mood, an instant of time, that quintessential moment of change that, while uniquely itself, also contains traces of its predecessor and hints of its antecedent."
Arts Northumberland, WALTER LUEDTKE