John Fincher: Botanica

JOHN FINCHER BOTANICA

JUNE 26 - JULY 26. 2015

LewAllenGalleries Railyard Arts District | 1613 Paseo de Peralta | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | tel 505.988.3250 www.lewallengalleries.com | info@lewallengalleries.com cover: Flores in Attica, 2015, oil on linen, 84” x 54”

JOHN FINCHER: BOTANICA

JUNE 26 - JULY 20 2015

John Fincher has long been known and revered for his unique style of realism that unfailingly produces images acclaimed for both their beauty and the pleasure produced from their unique color, subject, and composition.

Fincher’s work adeptly blends lush color, nuanced line, and gorgeous light with quirky perspective and whimsical detail. For over forty years, he has been acclaimed for his legendary images of prickly pears, big skies, and landscapes of the Southwest. He has referred to his own work as depicting his sense of “the trappings of the West,” although over the years that work has also featured subjects far different from those regional “trappings.”

In his newest body of work, for example, Fincher inaugurates a largely unexplored image choice and innovative manner of composition, creating a striking new series based on floral and plant motifs that represents a significant departure from the pictorial vocabulary of his previous and more familiar Southwestern paintings.

Entitled Botanica, this new series encompasses more than thirty oils on linen, oils on paper and watercolors. The series takes the artist’s previous love of flora and propels it to an entirely new level of contemporary vitality.

Grey Botanica, 2015, oil on linen, 40” x 38”

that implies a similar sense of the populist nobility attained in the more familiar pictures of his humble “trappings of the West.” In a broad sense, the work also achieves added contemporary relevance by demonstrating compelling relationships between the artist and the environment and inspires close attention to the beauty and mystery within our own natural surroundings. His inclusion of quotidian elements of leaves, stems, and buds floating on lyrically romantic backgrounds of water and sky rendered in smoky lush colors creates a slight visual incongruity, thus maintaining the quiet sense of ironic humor for which much of his painting is known.

With these new works, Fincher engages the tradition of botanical art that dates back 4,500 years to China and 1,700 years in the Eastern Mediterranean and lower Nile Valley of ancient Egypt where it was used in tombs as a form of knowledge preservation. The lineage of this work includes the masterworks of the genre’s legendary practitioners such as Leonardo da Vinci, Albrecht Dürer, Jan Brueghel the Elder, Pierre-Joseph Redouté, among others. Though Fincher’s interpretation rivals the finest of these in terms of striking visual beauty, his new works possess a radically different sense of contemporary presence.

Unlike the tradition’s typical formality and nearly exclusive use of exotic or ornamental floral subject, Fincher’s botanical works subtly combine both the elegance of fancy flower blossoms with the unexpected simplicity of desiccated seed pods, thistles and twigs. Rather than formal arrangements customary to the botanic tradition, Fincher composes the paintings in this series from cascading blossoms and pods floating randomly on subtle backgrounds of sky and water. The colors and painting style are as sumptuous as the best florilegia of the 17th century but the overall result also features a thoroughly modern dash of surreal quirk.

The new series possesses an enthralling beauty like that of his previous work, borne less of the subject matter itself and more of Fincher’s unique way of seeing it. His work has always been distinguished by an uncanny ability to transform his highly individual vision of whatever subject he chooses to paint into engaging visual experience.

The attainment of beauty in his work has largely been accomplished through indirection rather than selfconsciousness. As Wallace Stevens expressed the idea in his poem “Local Objects,” Fincher’s paintings are often successful precisely because they are “objects of insight… the things that come of their own accord.” Fincher’s work is less consciously labored and more joyfully felt.

Further, by juxtaposing the ordinary with more elegant blossoms, such as tulips and poppies, Fincher creates art

The new botanicals continue Fincher’s signature use of luminescent color and close-up perspective that 2

this tradition of reverence for natural materials.

serve to valorize details. In his Southwestern work, ordinary cactus pads, poplar trees, limbs and branches, and billowing clouds, are–however unintended by this humble artist–transformed into comprehensible touchstones of the American Frontier’s association as a place of individual independence, freedom, and optimism.

Fincher’s paintings are consistent in their sense of artistic liberation and abundant energy. In the new work, ordinary flowers, buds and stalks attain a heroic presence.

With the dawning of Renaissance humanism and a new interest in depicting the beauty of nature, artists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Dürer evolved botanical illustration in the 15th and 16th centuries by blending the attention to scientific detail that previously characterized the genre with a new regard for the specifically aesthetic attributes of the garden. By the 17th century, books began to appear featuring plants of exclusively ornamental interest often found in the gardens of wealthy patrons of the artists who faithfully depicted them in volumes called “florilegia” (from the Latin word for gathering of flowers).

The tradition out of which these new botanical works emerge is a long and rich one. Initially rooted more in practical needs than aesthetic impulse, the creation of botanical imagery traces its history back thousands of years to China and the Eastern Mediterranean. In ancient Egypt, detailed likenesses depicting plants were carved into the wall reliefs of tombs. In Western culture, it was the advent of herbal medicines in the first century B.C. that gave rise to images of medicinal plants being recorded in codices. Greek physicians produced illustrations depicting plants thought to have medicinal properties.

Copied by hand, these early botanical images were widely used for more than 1,500 years. Fincher works in

Such is the history of botanical art in which Fincher has created a new chapter. His is an entirely new expression of floral imagery rendered in the lush, rich color, and with the finesse of detail and painterly spontaneity that have made his previous paintings so well known and loved.

The new work retains his remarkable facility for using color as a modality of expression. It also continues other aspects of his finely honed process, including slightly impressionistic imagery that never strays too far from the recognizable, the use of bits of color to enliven line, and a sense of perspective and composition that keeps his style of serious painting from becoming overly formal.

As in his other work, these new floral paintings embody an easy elegance that is at once comfortable, unpretentious, and enduringly beautiful fine art. As an artist and an individual, Fincher has long felt a close connection to nature, which is faithfully reflected in this extraordinary new series. Be it of cactus, pine, thistle, pod, or bloom, the work of John Fincher uniquely honors the majesty of flora.

Kenneth R. Marvel

A Rose, 2015, oil on paper, 30” x 22”

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Monaco, 2015, oil on linen, 54” x 84” 4

Water Garden, 2015, oil on linen, 40” x 54”

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Penasco, 2015, oil on linen, 54” x 40”

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Bloomsbury, 2015, oil on linen, 30” x 70” 7

Tropicana Pine, oil on linen, 30” x 70”

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Companion: Shiki, oil on linen, 70” x 30”

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Virdis Botanica, 2015, oil on linen, 40” x 38”

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Baltic, 2015, oil on linen, 50” x 52”

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Rustler, 2015, oil on paper, 30” x 22”

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Terra Botanica, 2015, oil on linen, 40” x 38”

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Edith Anne, 2015, oil on linen, 32” x 30”

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Pods: Prairie Rose, 2015, oil on paper, 30” x 22”

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Pods: Bull Thistle, 2015, oil on paper, 30” x 22”

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Pods: Burr Reed, 2015, oil on paper, 30” x 22”

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Pods: Prarie Dock, 2015, oil on linen, 30” x 22”

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Pods: Perfoliata, 2015, oil on paper, 30” x 22”

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Vineyard, 2015, oil on paper, 30” x 22”

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Havisham Rose, 2015, oil on paper, 30” x 22”

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South Plains, 2015, oil on linen, 19” x 12”

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Summer Garden 2014, watercolor on paper, 12� x 9�

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Winter Garden, 2014, watercolor on paper, 9� x 12�

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Study: Grey Botanica, 2014, watercolor on paper, 8” x 8”

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Study: Water Garden, 2014, watercolor on paper, 6.5” x 9”

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Study: Flores in Atica, 2014, watercolor on paper, 8” x 5”

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Fifteen Brush #1 2015, oil on linen, 10” x 8”

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Fifteen Brush #2, 2015, oil on linen, 10” x 8”

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Fifteen Brush #3, 2015, oil on linen, 10” x 8”

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Fifteen Brush #4, 2015, oil on linen, 10” x 8”

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Fifteen Brush #5, 2015, oil on linen, 10” x 8”

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John Fincher Born: Hamilton, Texas, 1941 Education: 1962 1964 1966

Hardin-Simmons University, Abilene, TX B.A. Texas Technological College, Lubbock, TX M.F.A. University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK

Selected Solo Exhibitions 2015 2012

2011 2010 2009

2008 2007

2006

2004

2003

2001 1999

1997 1996

1995 1994

1993 1991 1990 1989

Botanica , LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM The Line of Nature: A Continuing Exploration, LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM Recent Works, LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM Enduring Terrain, LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM Fincher, Johnson, Mothner, Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe, NM John Fincher, Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe, NM Out West: The Great American Landscape, Meridian International Center, Washington, D.C.; National Art Museum of China, Beijing, Shanghai Museum Spirited Expressions, Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe, NM Limbs/Branches/Barriers: Recent Work, 2000-2004, Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe, NM Three by Five to Eleven by Fourteen: Gallery Selections, Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe, NM LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM Realism Meets Abstraction, Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San Francisco, CA LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM Terra Paradiso, Hand Graphics Gallery, Santa Fe, NM LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM Artistas Contemporaneo De Nuevo Mexico, Mayor’s Gallery, Guadalajara, Mexico Realism ’94, Fletcher Gallery Fine Art, Santa Fe, NM Elaine Horwitch Gallery, Santa Fe, NM Elaine Horwitch Gallery, Santa Fe, NM J. Cacciola Gallery, New York, NY Elaine Horwitch Gallery, Scottsdale, AZ 34

1988

1987

1985

1984

1982

1981

1978

1977

Common Ground, Albuquerque Museum, Albuquerque, NM Rivers, Stella, Fincher, Elaine Horwitch Galleries, Santa Fe, NM Segal Gallery, New York, NY Egypt, Munson Gallery, Santa Fe, NM Arts New Mexico, Museum of Modern Art of Latin America, Washington, DC Route 66 Gallery, Philadelphia, PA Salon D’Automne, Artistes Contemporains Du Sud- Quest Des ‘Etats-Unis, Grand Palais, Paris, France Sarah Campbell Blaffer Gallery, University of Houston, Houston, TX Elaine Horwitch Gallery, Santa Fe, NM New Mexico in Toronto, Linda Durham Gallery, Toronto, Canada Robert Rice Gallery, Houston, TX

Selected Public Collections: Albuquerque Museum of Art & History, NM Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ Bethel College, North Newton, KS Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX

Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, Taos, NM Honolulu Academy of Art, HI

McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX Museum of Abilene, TX

National Conservatory, USSR

New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM

Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, LA

Oklahoma City Museum of Art, Oklahoma City, OK

Picker Art Gallery, Colgate University, Hamilton, NY

Richard M. Ross Art Museum, Ohio Wesleyan University, Delaware, OH

Scottsdale Center for the Arts, Scottsdale, AZ Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC

University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson, AZ

University of Oklahoma Museum of Art, Norman, OK Westheimer Collection, Oklahoma City, OK Wichita Art Museum, Wichita, KS

Railyard Arts District | 1613 Paseo de Peralta | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | tel 505.988.3250 www.lewallengalleries.com | info@lewallengalleries.com Š 2015 LewAllen Contemporary LLC Artwork Š John Fincher