‘There’s serious work at Segal, too. One successful example is an exquisite, ultra realist oil, ‘ISOLATING LANGUAGE’, by Joseph McNamara, a New Yorker who is a cousin of Boston artist John McNamara but whose work bears no familial relationship to the Boston McNamara’s heroic abstractions. Joseph McNamara is a stylistic descendent of the great Northern Renaissance still life painters. For ‘ISOLATING LANGUAGE’ he has chosen, and mastered, a technically difficult subject — glasses and the way light streaming in from a nearby window affects them.’

Christine Temin reviewing a group show at the Thomas Segal Gallery, Boston Globe Thursday, July 18, 1985