23-Apr-2000 Sunday
When the nation was young, American artists began a love affair
with
landscape painting. The passion was not only for nature, but for
what
nature could tell the artist and his audience about their connection to
the
cosmos, spiritually. In literature, this idea took its most eloquent
shape
in Emerson's essay "Nature" and Thoreau's enduring book "Walden."
In
painting, there were Luminists: Martin Johnson Heade, Fitz Hugh Lane
and
others.
This same passion for nature, with a spiritual overlay,
persists in
painting, though it sometimes takes more brooding forms in an age
when the
environment is imperiled in a way that it wasn't back in the 19th
century.
"Transcending Earth and Sky," at San Diego State's University Art
Gallery,
is evidence of the continuing life of this affair and our darker
vision of
the relationship between people and nature.
Some of the
seven artists selected for this exhibition by gallery director
Tina Yapelli
are steeped in 19th-century sources and atmosphere. Joan
Nelson paints trees,
hills and clouds with a clarity and attention to light
that brings to mind
British such painters as John Constable or Americans
from Lane to John
Frederick Kensett. Stephen Hannock -- featured in a solo
show at Balboa
Park's Timken Museum of Art five years ago -- paints darkly
lit twilight
moments that take one back to moody late 19th-century Tonalist
pictures by
George Inness, Dwight Tryon and related figures.
Others who seem like
traditional realists at first encounter don't after
close scrutiny. Peter
Edlund organizes his wooded scenes to create
surrealist twists along with the
suggestion of a storyline, while Robert
Cocke's desert scenes have clouds
never found in nature, terrain with
curious details and a palette of
unnatural colors.
Gillian Theobald, who lived and worked
in San Diego in the '80s, stripped
nature down to a few essentials in her
earlier work -- and still does. Tops
of trees appear in the bottom of each
canvas: shadowy shapes set in a
single color surface, as if the horizon line
existed below the bottom of
the painting.
None of the artists in
Yapelli's exhibition is unabashedly nostalgic -- and
thank goodness for that.
Every age has to reinvent art to suit its cultural
climate; work that merely
dwells on the past can take on the feel of a
fossilized relic. The painters
in "Transcending Sky and Earth" pay homage
to older painting but don't
worship it.
Living tradition
Nelson has a gift for working in a
mostly traditional way and still making
a scene look fresh. Scale works in
her favor: her pictures, most from the
early to mid-'90s, are essentially
miniatures containing wide vistas. They
show us the grandeur of nature while
making us feel intimate with it.
A barren tree on a promontory leans to
the left, like a finger pointing at
the softly colored, clouded sky that
takes up most of the picture. In
another Nelson, a network of dark trunks
seem to butt up against the
picture surface, giving way to a scene viewed
through their lace-like
pattern.
Among the exhibiting artists, Hannock
is the other traditionalist. Nelson
makes radiant use of color, but he is
clearly devoted to it. Titles like
"Flooded River: Golden Dusk" and
"Incendiary Nocturne: Emerald Launch at
Dusk" tell us as much. The first of
these pictures has a burnished look,
more red than golden. It bathes water
and sky alike. The second canvas,
much larger, is elegant. The content is
ambiguous: Are fireworks lighting
up the sky or is something more sinister
creating the jet of light?
The light in Nelson's and Hannock's paintings
is vivid but suggestively
ethereal. It is of this world and otherworldly, as
for the Luminists before
them.
Theobald is as interested in light. She
aligns two canvases within the same
composition, having one stand for night
and the other for day. In either,
you can see trees, but faintly. It's as if
there's a phantom version of
nature in her paintings, lovely but dreamlike.
It's as if the trees have
died and gone to their own version of
heaven.
Light is a key component in Julia Fish's paintings, too. The
interplay
between image and abstracted form is her other prevalent motif. She
weds
them past in "Transom No. 2 (Twilight)," in which a scattering of
leaves
press against its surface. The leaves, loosely outlined, are dark and
so is
the window-shaped canvas that frames them. A companion picture,
"Transom,"
contains no anchoring image. Veinlike lines weave up and across a
cool
green surface.
In this show, Fish's transom pictures are her most
absorbing works. Others,
shaped like a nearly square window, seem so
self-conscious about their
wedding of image and abstraction.
This same
reliance on all-too-carefully calculated effects mars Anthony
Pessler's "No
title" paintings. The crystal-clear Surrealism of Magritte
meets the visual
trickeries of Escher in his paintings. Trees resemble
medieval architecture.
Skies are filled with perfect rows of tears. Water
is absolutely still. He
creates a world apart from ours, with religious
symbols. But in style, the
work is too slick to create a different world
that feels as if it is much
more a hodgepodge of influences -- even though
it aims to be
mystical.
Edlund favors forests in his paintings; Cocke, the desert. That
makes
geographic sense, since Edlund was raised in Connecticut and lives in
New
York, while Cocke lives in Arizona. They are kindred spirits, though,
in
one way: both see the surreality in nature.
The paintings by Edlund
teem with life. Hundreds of worms crawl across
trees and plants in
"Comprehending the Unfathomable." Mushrooms gather like
little groups of
hooded humans in "The Development of Poison" and another
crowd of them is
visible in the distance. He makes us feel the presence of
an unseen force in
these pictures that is both glorious and sinister.
Clouds and deserts, in
Cocke's pictures, don't look like clouds and desert
you've seen anywhere. His
bluffs and flatlands have clarity that seem
somewhat cartoonish and somewhat
indebted to Northern European art of the
Durer variety. The pair of hills in
"Link" are unnaturally symmetrical. He
peels away a little section of one, as
if to emphasize its artificiality
even more. The green bush resting between
them is out of place, too.
Still, there's something covertly mystical
about some of Cocke's desert
images. Clouds form patterns that verge on
language in pictures like
"Message" and "Her Smile." His landscapes are
visionary, in a restrained
sort of way.
Much of the art in this show
encourages the viewer to enter a state of
reverie, to drift into the pictured
sky or terrain, in an imaginative leap
of faith. Some of these artists make
that leap more possible than others.
As a group, though, they create a tidy
argument for the continuing life of
landscape painting.
As long as
there are skies or earth to be painted, they will be painted.
The passion
for abstraction didn't kill landscapes in the 20th century, and
digital means
of making art won't eliminate the handmade image of nature in
the
21st.
ART REVIEW
"Transcending Earth and Sky," exhibition of
paintings by seven artists,
sponsored by the San Diego State University Art
Council. Through May 17;
University Art Gallery, SDSU, 5500 Campanile Drive.
Free; (619) 594-5171,
www.sdsu.edu/artgallery
Robert L. Pincus can be
reached by phone, (619) 293-1831; fax, (619)
293-2436; mail, P.O. Box 120191,
San Diego, CA 92112-0191; or e-mail,
robert.pincus@uniontrib.com.