Nathanson is an abstract painter whose works in these series reflect a process of locating a relationship between biblical text and the necessity of painting. Seeing Sinai: Meditations on Exodus 33–4 was completed in 2005 following a collaboration with Arnold Eisen, now Chancellor of The Jewish Theological Seminary. A visual commentary on Moses’s encounter with God, it began with the question, “Is there anything distinctive about seeing in the Torah?”

New Translations: Genesis of 2007–2010 is a series of mixed media collages – a meditation on energy and matter as it was formed, separated and ordered in the first six days of Creation. It also includes the seventh day, when God rested. Nathanson uses discarded studio materials, plastics, paper and paint, to structure her reflections on the relationships between the different parts of existence. These unbounded assemblages have been created out of the artist’s own “welter and waste” – a metaphor for the tohu wabohu, the earth’s state at the beginning of Creation.

 New Translations has been influenced by such literary texts as Robert Alter’s Genesis: Translation and Commentary and Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg’s The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis, as well as other contemporary and ancient biblical interpretations, known in Hebrew as midrashim. Continuously experimenting with visual human responses to paint, Nathanson’s paintings reflect her search to reconcile the physical properties of paint – viscosities, fluidity, translucency, color relations – with the metaphoric and spiritual transformations that painting can provoke.