FINCHER
JOHN FINCHER
IN THE POPLARS ETERNAL BEAUTY LIVES
IN THE POPLARS ETERNAL BEAUTY LIVES
Two & Two on Fall Sky, 1989, oil on paper, 28.75" x 21"
John Fincher: In the Poplars Eternal Beauty Lives
There is a quality of stillness in John Fincher’s renowned poplar paintings that belies their energy. These works vibrate with color and movement, yet at their heart lies an unhurried contemplation—a meditative gaze on the colors and light of the American Southwest. Across decades of painting and numerous other subjects, Fincher’s vision remained unwaveringly focused: to translate the ordinary motifs of the Western landscape into a visual language that feels both monumental and deeply personal. The poplar, the cactus, the brush, the seed pod—for Fincher, these are not simply subjects, but thresholds into a broader understanding of nature and perception.
Born in 1941 in Hamilton, Texas, Fincher grew up surrounded by the geography that would shape his art. After earning his MFA at the University of Oklahoma and teaching at Wichita State University, he settled in New Mexico. From his Santa Fe studio, Fincher explored the interplay of structure and spontaneity, color and restraint, surface and depth—each painting an experiment in finding the pulse within landscape and details of the objects that have come to signify the spirit of the Great American Frontier.
Fincher once said that he painted the “trappings of the West”—but his definition of that phrase was unconventional. Rather than cowboy paraphernalia or heroic vistas, his trappings were the natural and domestic forms that surrounded him: twisted pine limbs, grasses, desert blooms, and the skeletal shapes of winter trees. His aim was not nostalgia, but revelation. Through repetition and close observation, he sought the eternal within the particular, creating compositions that teeter between realism and abstraction, intimacy and grandeur.
In Poplar Seasons (ca. 1990s), Fincher transforms a row of poplar trees into a vertical rhythm of color and gesture. The painting hums with contrast: the dense, almost tactile application of oil and pastel set against bands of sky rendered in luminous blues and whites. Each poplar is a world unto itself—green deepening into shadow, rust blooming into fiery autumn, bark rendered in chalky whites that recall the cool crispness of winter. The four trees stand side by side like sentinels, each capturing a different moment in time, a different phase of the year.
The composition compresses space, flattening the landscape into parallel planes of color and form. Fincher’s choice to bring the trees close to the picture plane removes the surrounding environment, so that the viewer faces the trees directly, as if encountering them in a gust of wind. The vertical thrust of their trunks gives the work its pulse, while the mark making—dragged, scraped, layered—lends it a sense of immediacy and motion. Poplar Seasons is less a depiction of trees than a meditation on change itself, an abstracted symphony of growth and decay, color and cycle.
Throughout Fincher’s oeuvre, this negotiation between the representational and the abstract defines his visual language. The flatness of his images is deceptive. His brushwork and color layering create a vibrating surface where perception constantly shifts—what seems solid at one glance dissolves into pure color the next. In this, Fincher aligns himself with modernists who saw in the landscape a way to express the architecture of emotion rather than topography: Clyfford Still’s jagged edges of color, Georgia O’Keeffe’s monumental flowers, Richard
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Poplar Seasons, cac. 1990s, oil and pastel on paper, 11" x 16"
Autumn Hills, n.d., oil on paper, 13.5" x 9.75"
John Fincher: In the Poplars Eternal Beauty Lives
Diebenkorn’s meditative structures of light. Yet Fincher’s touch is distinctly his own—rooted in the textures of the West, rendered with a muscular delicacy that mirrors the land itself.
If Poplar Seasons enshrines and venerates the passage of seasons, One & Three on Neon Sky (1989) captures the fleeting intensity of a moment. The title alone suggests both specificity and multiplicity: one and three, singular and plural, grounded and ethereal. Here, Fincher’s brushwork grows bolder, freer. Layers of deep green and midnight blue build a dense forest-like structure, while strokes of coral, rose, and lavender blaze through the canopy like shards of twilight. The contrast between these hues—cool and warm, recessive and assertive—creates a dynamic tension that feels both optical and emotional.
Fincher’s handling of paint in this work is particularly striking. He pushes pigment into thick, expressive passages, scraping and revising until form gives way to sensation. The trees emerge only partially from abstraction; they are as much gestures as objects. In this interplay of figure and ground, trees become conduits of light, and light itself becomes tangible, a substance that presses against the picture plane.
The pinks and reds that dominate One & Three on Neon Sky are not decorative; they are transformative. They shift the familiar greens of foliage into something visionary, even otherworldly. There is a sense of seeing the landscape through heightened perception, where natural light becomes inner illumination. In this
way, Fincher’s painting approaches a sense of the spiritual—not through overt symbolism, but through an intensity of seeing that borders on revelation. It is as if the artist has distilled the very temperature of dusk into paint. In his singular Poplar works, the compositional focus narrows further, reducing the scene to a solitary vertical form. Against a pale, rose-colored background, the lone tree in Single Poplar #1, rises like a column of dark energy. The brushwork here is looser and more gestural, yet no less deliberate. The surface hums with layers of mauve, violet, and indigo, interspersed with flashes of orange and green. These colors mingle and collide, suggesting not the surface of bark but the aura of living matter—the vibration of life itself.
These paintings demonstrates Fincher’s ability to balance monumentality of a poplar with the intimacy of a single tree. Though modest in scale, works in this series feel vast with their central form commanding the composition like a totem. The backgrounds, textured with scraped pigment, recall the light of a New Mexico late afternoon, where color seems to hover in the air rather than rest on the ground.
The poplar’s vertical silhouette evokes human presence—a figure standing alone in a field of light. The work radiates both solitude and resilience, qualities that echo Fincher’s larger vision of the Western spirit: enduring, unyielding, quietly magnificent.
Fincher’s contribution to contemporary Western art lies not in his adherence to its tropes, but in his transformation of them. Where the traditional Western painter often celebrates vast open vistas and heroic scale, Fincher turns his
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Blue on Evening, ca. 1990s, oil and pastel on paper, 24" x 8"
Red on Blue Sky, ca. 1990s, oil and pastel on paper, 24" x 8"
John Fincher: In the Poplars Eternal Beauty Lives
gaze to the intimate and elemental. He extracts grandeur from a grouping of branches, transcendence from a cluster of leaves. His “trappings of the West” are reimagined through color and form until they become universal emblems of endurance and change.
In this sense, his paintings are not about the West as place but the West as an ideal, a myth—a landscape of mind and memory, defined by openness, space, and solitude. His work became known as sophisticated iconography of the Great American Frontier. His surfaces, thick with pigment and gesture, echo the terrain itself: rough, layered, and luminous. Yet beneath the rugged exterior lies a tenderness, a reverence for the fragile beauty of nature. He captures not just how the landscape looks, but how it feels—the shimmer of heat, the dryness of air, the way light fractures through branches. It is here that living things survive and endure. That goes for the people who came here and settled it. That spirit is echoed in Fincher’s poplar paintings: strength, beauty and grandeur.
Looking across Fincher’s career, one senses an artist devoted to the act of seeing. Each painting is an encounter between the self and the world, rendered with honesty and wonder. His use of scale invites the viewer to step closer, to inhabit the painting’s rhythm, while his colors draw on the desert’s chromatic extremes: the greens of piñon, the rusts of earth, the blanketing blues of Southwestern sky.
John Fincher passed away in 2024, leaving behind a body of work that continues to shape the language of Western contemporary art. His vision endures because
it transcends geography. Through the branches of a poplar or the spines of a cactus, Fincher found the universal pulse of Southwestern life. His paintings remind us that the act of looking can itself be transformative. In their layered surfaces, we encounter not only the landscape of the American West, but the landscape of attention—how seeing deeply can turn the familiar into the sublime. The trees, the flowers, the brush—all are records of observation and presence, moments caught between permanence and change.
John Fincher’s art is not an escape from the world but an immersion in it. In every stroke, there is gratitude for what endures and awe for what fades. The line of nature that runs through his work is also the line of life itself—fragile, strong, endlessly renewing.
- David Grey
Autumn Sky, ca. 1990s, oil and pastel on paper, 29.5"
x 10.5"
Poplar Sky Show, ca. 1990s, oil and pastel on paper, 29.5" x 10.5"
Single Poplar #1, n.d., oil on paper, 15" x 5.5"
Hazy Dawn, n.d., oil on paper, 7.5" x 5.5"
Four Poplars, 1987, oil on canvas, 72" x 48"
Blue Poplars #3, 1987, ink and watercolor on paper, 30" x 22.25"
Four Seasons, 1990, oil on canvas, 36" x 48"
Summer Shadows, n.d., oil on canvas, 48" x 72"
The Sawmill Poplars, n.d., oil on canvas, 84" x 60"
Pine Branch: Blue, 2008, oil on board, 16" x 20"
Three & Two on Desert Sky, 1989, oil on paper, 28.75" x 21"
Blue Poplars #1, 1987, ink and watercolor on paper, 30" x 22.25"
Blue Poplars #2, 1987, ink and watercolor on paper, 30" x 22.25"
Opera Season, 1991, oil and pastel on paper, 23" x 15.5"
Single Poplar #7, n.d., oil on paper, 15.5" x 5.5"
Single Poplar #2, n.d., oil on paper, 15" x 5.5"
Red on Blue, ca. 1990s, oil and pastel on paper, 5.5" x 3.75"
Green on Blue, ca. 1990s, oil and pastel on paper, 5.5" x 3.75"
Red on Brown, ca. 1990s, oil and pastel on paper, 5.5" x 3.75"
Green on Brown, ca. 1990s, oil and pastel on paper, 5.5" x 3.75"
Blue on Dusk, ca. 1990s, oil and pastel on paper, 14.75" x 10.75"
Poplar Sunset, ca. 1990s, oil and pastel on paper, 29.5" x 10.5"
Green on Sunset, ca. 1990s, oil and pastel on paper, 14.75" x 10.75"
Three on Blue, ca. 1990s, oil and pastel on paper, 7.5" x 5.5"
Red on Silver, ca. 1990s, oil and pastel on paper, 5.5" x 3.75"
Green on Silver, ca. 1990s, oil and pastel on paper, 5.5" x 3.75"
Green on Silver II, ca. 1990s, oil and pastel on paper, 5.5" x 3.75"
Green on Blue, ca. 1990s, oil and pastel on paper, 7.5" x 5.5"
Red & Blue on Dawn, ca. 1990s, oil and pastel on paper, 14.75" x 10.75"
Poplar Twilight, 1981, oil on paper, 28.5" x 20.75"
