sociated with the land he paints. The essential component of Fincher’s work, pointing out, for example, the beauty in the smallest detail of a pine branch against the gradient of a sunset, is achieved through a singular blend of sensuality and observation. The result is to inspire grace from the commonplace. Fincher’s work derives startling emotional resonance from a combination of rigorously balanced composition, nuanced brushwork, dramatic shadowing, and the application of intense points of contrasting colors to punctuate significant visual elements. Ultimately, his work explores diverse art historical and personal references to offer new understandings of America’s natural and cultural landscape. His images subtly unravel the manifold meanings inscribed within representations of the American West.
With a direct honesty—the goal of “painting things the way they are”—Woody Gwyn’s humility belies the complex techniques and
masterful painting skills that have made him one of the most acclaimed realist painters of the American landscape. Use of unusual perspective and dramatic angles, an ability to render the ordinary as heroic, color that is as lushly romantic as it is grippingly real, baffling capacities to capture light that alternates between the crystalline and the veiled, produce at the brush of Woody Gwyn pictures that are superlative in their verisimilitude and compelling in their transcendent power to succinctly communicate the essence of things. These diverse skills are mainly applied in Gwyn’s work to presenting unalloyed snippets from the places he observes. By attending as much to the most prosaic detail of a scene as he does its majestic grandeur, Gwyn paints a piece of roadside gravel as though it were a piece of sacred sculpture and renders rust on guardrails with the same reverence da Vinci felt for the sleeve folds of the “Mona Lisa.” This respect for the smallest detail—even in the presence of breathtaking vistas—distinguishes Gwyn’s from other perspectives on landscape. And in his sense of parity between the majestic and the mundane lies a large measure of the artist’s genius to bring about
fluctuations in the viewer’s sense of reality, subtle turns in perception that shift the mind and move the heart. The visual journey that is a Gwyn painting opens the eyes to new ways of seeing and inspires enhanced depths of feeling about space, the land and the definition of beauty. Gwyn, like van Gogh, refuses to stop working on a painting—adding, subtracting, working and reworking, constantly refining—as though this unremitting dedication to getting it all just right is required to achieve the sense of transcendence and essence that Gwyn candidly states as his aim as an artist. Gwyn is a virtuoso at bringing out an epic realism of the American landscape, but his challenge to extract the beauty from the guardrail, stop sign or the everyday object attests to Gwyn’s mastery of painting. The viewer is captivated by the poetic affinity to make a subtle comparison between the natural and the manmade. His conception of the beautiful leaves no doubt that a mountain or ocean can be in aesthetic union with a guardrail or highway. At his hand, the ordinary suddenly is significant and the current becomes timeless.