Eliot Fremont-Smith wrote about Beth's work in connection with her exhibition at the Oakland Museum of Art.  His words are worth repeating here. Beth Van Hoesen's prints and watercolors are of very simple things – faces, flowers, rabbits, crocodiles – or rather of very complex things made extremely clear by line. Her strength of line, marvelous in sureness and economy, reminds one anew how supple and subtle and subversive – line can be. We are brought back to the roots of art, of seeing and being made to see.

But what we see and connote through very fine art – which Van Hoesen's surely is – is not just simple things, but the artist's attitude and something more than a touch of risk and magic. This artist's attitude ranges from admiration through irony, with ardor and wit lurking always at the edges. The risk, the tension in her art, is in its intimacy, which is at once intense and tender. In public, it strangely relaxes us, and beckons us to discover the newness of the familiar all over again. That's the magic. And it changes us. That's the subversion.