Light of Day: The Language of Landscape

PURCHASE CATALOGUE

Light of Day

The Language of Landscape Curated by Karen Wilkin

MARCH 4-APRIL 1, 2022

This catalog was produced in conjunction with the exhibition:

Light of Day The Language of Landscape March 4–April 1, 2022 Westbeth Gallery

55 Bethune St, New York NY www.westbeth.org Hours: Wed-Sun 1-6pm Front cover: Stanley Lewis Mayville Courthouse

2006, oil on canvas, 35 x 47 in.

Courtesy Betty Cuningham Gallery

This page: Elizabeth O’Reilly Afternoon Light, Maine (detail) 2019, oil on panel, 11½ x 22 in.

Light of Day

The Language of Landscape Curated by Karen Wilkin

MARCH 4 -APRIL 1, 2022 WESTBETH GALLERY · 55 BETHUNE STREET, NEW YORK, NY 10014

Most of the artists in the “Light of Day” exhibition were schooled at a time when landscape painting was repudiated by many art critics and galleries centered in New York City. Clement Greenberg, one of the most influential critics of the time, had denigrated the very practice of easel painting as an unsuitable vehicle for ambitious art. Not everyone agreed, however, and even fewer do so today, when representational painting has enjoyed a substantial revival.

Westbeth Gallery, situated at the West Village-Chelsea border in a project that converted the old Bell Labs into artist housing, plays a unique role in the cultural life of New York City, by offering its large, beautiful 2000 square foot space to artists through its annual call for proposals.

In May 2017, as our Portrait Project group of artists wrapped up its “Artists Portraying Artists” show at Westbeth, I began thinking that time had come to show the work of landscape painters who had endured and been influenced one way or another by the era of abstraction.

I asked friends whose work I admire–Diane, John, Kamilla, and Tony–if they wanted to organize a show and apply for the next round of Westbeth’s annual call.

We all agreed to extend the group to include Betsy, Bill, Elizabeth, and Temma. Our honored predecessors in the field–Al, Lois, and Stanley—were invited as “emerita.” We wanted a curator to choose work and install the show and put the whole thing into perspective, and we were thrilled when Karen Wilkin agreed.

The work exhibited reflects not only an affinity for nature and representation, but also the influence of Abstract Expressionism—despite Clement Greenberg’s famous dismissal when figuration emerged in de Kooning’s Abstract Expressionist work: you can’t paint that way, nowadays.

—Howard Gladstone January, 2022

Light of Day Temma Bell William Christine Lois Dodd Diane Drescher Howard Gladstone John Goodrich Elizabeth Higgins Albert Kresch Stanley Lewis Elizabeth O’Reilly Tony Serio Kamilla Talbot

Albert Kresch

Houses, Nova Scotia—Isle Madame

2006, acrylic and oil on canvas board, 16 x 20 in.

Nature and Culture:

Twelve Contemporary Landscape Painters Karen Wilkin I That painting replicates what can be seen is an apparently indelible idea, but artists and the visible world have long had a vexed relationship. Giorgio Vasari praised the subjects of his Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects not only because, unlike their “rude Gothic” predecessors, they understood the virtues of antique art, but also because, like the Greeks and Romans, they studied nature. Yet nature was a flawed and unreliable model. The solution? To correct nature’s imperfect parts by studying her perfect ones. Raphael was said to have combined the best attributes of many different women to create an ideally beautiful Madonna. By contrast, the Baroque master of dramatic lighting and expressive staging, Caravaggio, was derided by his rivals for “merely copying nature,” recording what he saw without improving upon it.

At the official academies of art established in the 17th and 18th centuries, students were taught to improve things. They drew models posed to look as much like antique sculptures as possible, filtering their perceptions through such approved old masters as Raphael. History painting — scenes from the Bible,

mythology, and the not recent past, enacted by large scale figures — was the touchstone of ability. Portraits and scenes of everyday life were next, with landscape and still life at the end. But working directly from the landscape was a significant part of a young artist’s training. When aspiring painters went to Italy to advance their knowledge through first-hand encounters with revered works of art, they were also expected to absorb the spirit of place by working from local models and recording, on the spot, Roman ruins, picturesque towns, and the Italian landscape. Rome Prize winners hiked out to the campagna to do plein air studies of places celebrated for their beauty and for their associations with events from antiquity. Even Nicolas Poussin, the head of the French academy, and his friend Claude Gelée (known as Claude Lorrain), are supposed to have ridden daily into the campagna to draw.

For younger painters, working out of doors obliged them to deal with nuances and subtleties of light and color that could not be experienced in the studio or learned from manuals. An influential treatise on the artist’s education by the painter Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, published in 1799/1800, placed special emphasis on studying landscape, urging aspiring practitioners to paint directly from nature. Valenciennes provided a helpful list of stimulating subjects, advising such eye-sharpening projects as observing pebbles under water, noting the differences between stones polished by streams and those on dry land, and witnessing the eruption of a volcano — the last deemed “desirable at least once in his lifetime.”

The appearance of such natural phenomena, like the appearance of the human body in different positions, were supposed to be internalized, so that they could be used as building blocks in history paintings. There were, for example, tree painting competitions held by the Academies, with prizes awarded for accurately portraying particular species from memory. That ingenious folding paintbox/easel/stool/palette combinations were offered for sale in the 19th century attests to the increasing popularity of painting en plein air, but it hardly needs saying that all of this was regarded only as a means to an end. Works painted en plein air were

Lois Dodd

September Hackmatack + Birch

2018, oil on Masonite, 15 7/8 x 15 7/8 in. ©Lois Dodd, courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York

understood as studies undertaken to educate the eye and furnish motifs, possibly for future use in creating backgrounds. Studies of campagna could provide historically convincing settings for scenes from Roman history, but they were studio tools, usually painted on flimsy surfaces, not considered as finished paintings or intended for exhibition. A certain amount of contempt attached to artists who supported themselves by painting vedute — scenes of picturesque landscapes, towns, and classical ruins — for sale to visitors making the Grand Tour.

Fast forward to the present exhibition. As we all know, the Academy’s entrenched attitudes changed dramatically with the advent of Impressionism (prefigured by Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot’s limpid studies of the Italian landscape). Anything seen was deemed significant enough to stimulate a finished painting and evoking the act of seeing on canvas became more important and interesting to the artist than accurately rendering what had been seen. In combination with Charles Baudelaire’s exhortation to address modern life, this emphasis on responding to experience destroyed, at least for progressive artists, the Academy’s hierarchy of subject matter. The painters in this exhibition are the contemporary heirs to these assumptions. They all make their responses to rural and urban landscapes the driving force of their work, basing their paintings on direct encounters and observation, and translating — or more accurately, transubstantiating — their perceptions of the natural world, with or without man-made inclusions, into highly personal pictorial languages. They belong to different generations and have diverse backgrounds and formations as artists. They have preferences for certain kinds of stimuli, but no one replicates his or her nominal subjects literally. Instead, they transform them in widely differing ways: intensifying, subduing, or completely reinventing color; simplifying or shattering forms and shapes; expanding or compressing space; and more. Yet they are united by their shared enthusiasm for nature (defined in varying ways) and for intense observation (with an admixture of memory). They have in common, as well, an interest in the vari-

ables of light, an appreciation of the un-picturesque, and an enjoyment of things captured by an apparently casual glance. All communicate powerfully in their work their fascination with the act of seeing and the act of transferring pigment to a surface.

II Temma Bell presents long views of open country, sometimes returning to a familiar spot in a different season, from a slightly different viewpoint, but always creating tension between the material presence of paint on a surface and the suggestion of enterable distance. By contrast, the space in Lois Dodd’s landscapes and cityscapes is always intimate and confrontational. She denies us a place to stand within her images and often, denies us a horizon, compelling us to consider the geometric structure of her images as acutely as the way she conjures up particular places, qualities of light, and times of year with assertive planes and touches.

The work of Diane Drescher, Howard Gladstone, John Goodrich, and Tony Serio suggests that they all prefer the unpremeditated view, accepting what presents itself rather than seeking a special configuration. (I’m reminded of an interview with a well-known Canadian landscape painter, Reta Cowley, then in her eighties. Asked what she looked for in a motif, she said “I like something in the front, something in the middle, and something in the back,”) Over time, Drescher’s, Gladstone’s, Goodrich’s, and Serio’s deceptively plainspoken paintings reveal more inner complexities than we first suspected, more attention to unexpected relationships, and more shifts in viewpoint. We discover, too, that their color, so evocative of specific moments and locations, is both accurate, in terms of our remembered experience, and surprising, as are the views of places we recognize.

Elizabeth Higgins distills her images from observation, often paring her images down to large elemental areas; dramatic skies or expanses

of water can dominate the canvas, but also read as independent shapes. In other works, she frames more complex notations with broad planes that can be rationalized anecdotally but also function as big abstract elements. Elizabeth O’Reilly deploys the forthright planes of man-made structures in a similar way, disciplining and sometimes blocking the randomness of the natural world with the clean edges and geometric expanses of the built environment, usually seen from a close viewpoint. (As this exhibition makes clear, however, she is not immune to the attractions of natural elements with a strong geometric character.)

The superheated color, firm construction, and frontality of Al Kresch’s landscapes may be evidence of his early studies with Hans Hofmann, but the jaunty energy and ferocity of these deceptively modest paintings are his own. Like Dodd, Kresch belongs to a generation who were young painters when abstraction was presented as a necessity. Yet, again like Dodd, he ignored these assumptions and moved determinedly towards perception and reference, employing brilliant color for maximum expressiveness. William Christine and Kamilla Talbot both treat their generating subjects with great audacity and freedom, fragmenting the image into bold strokes and rhythmic touches. Christine’s improvisations on verdant landscapes and flower beds are all-over fields of vibrating, fiercely contrasting hues that become equivalents for growth and abundance. Talbot’s cool, loose-limbed paintings range from close ups of undergrowth to long views, all presented with a sense of urgency and implied mobility. We feel as if the image will change if we look away.

The wind will blow, the water will move. And then we are captured by the fact of paint and stroke again.

The passage of time and the effort of perceiving are as much the subjects of Stanley Lewis’ paintings as the banal New England terrain he has long observed — his immediate surroundings, nearby towns, and nondescript unbuilt areas. The intensity and duration of his looking finds

physical form in encrusted paint, added strips of canvas, and collaged on elements, with the expedient means of attachment unconcealed. Lewis holds our attention with the tension between his unremarkable, convincingly rendered subjects and the brute physicality with which he brings them to life.

III Wayne Thiebaud (a fine landscape painter himself) explained remaining passionate about painting over a working life of more than eight decades because of “the sheer attractiveness of making your own world.” Despite their shared fascination with working from perception, I suspect that the twelve artists in this exhibition would agree. Each turns familiar surroundings into something we have not seen before — his or her own world — and makes us keep looking.

—Karen Wilkin New York, January 2022

New York-based independent curator and art critic Karen Wilkin is the Contributing Editor for Art for The Hudson Review and a regular contributor to The New Criterion, Art in America and The Wall Street Journal.

Temma Bell

Temma Bell

Towards Delhi, Fall

2015, oil on canvas, 24 x 36 in.

Temma Bell

Snow Towards Delhi

2016, oil on linen, 12 x 16 in.

Temma Bell Pastures

2012, oil on linen, 16 x 20 in.

William Christine

William Christine

New Mexico Garden

2020, watercolor, 22 x 15 in.

William Christine

Garden Under the Blood Moon

2018, oil on canvas, 33 x 24 in.

William Christine

Waiting for the Bus in Santa Fe

2020, watercolor, 15 x 22 in.

Lois Dodd

Lois Dodd

Bushel Basket + Iris Leaves

2015, oil on Masonite, 12 x 19 7/8 in. ©Lois Dodd, courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York

Lois Dodd

Williamsburg Bridge, Morning

1988, oil on Masonite, 16 x 13 in. ©Lois Dodd, courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York

Lois Dodd

Blaisey’s Place, Spring

1999, oil on Masonite, 10 x 11 in. ©Lois Dodd, courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York

Diane Drescher

Diane Drescher

Landscape with Magnolia Leaves

2020, oil on canvas, 28 x 28 in.

Diane Drescher

Pecos Ruins on Cloudy Day

2018, oil on canvas, 12 x 18 in.

Diane Drescher

Rocky Escarpment

2020, oil on canvas, 12 x 16 in.

Howard Gladstone

Howard Gladstone

Three Silos

2019, oil on canvas, 24 x 36 in.

Howard Gladstone

Meshoppen Bridge

2019, oil on canvas, 19 x 24 in.

Howard Gladstone

Snake Hill Road

2019, oil on canvas, 23 x 36 in.

John Goodrich

John Goodrich

Flower Garden, Addison

2019, oil on canvas board, 12 x 16 in.

John Goodrich

Truck, Addison

2019, oil on canvas board, 12 x 16 in.

John Goodrich

Sheboygan Streets

2017, oil on canvas board, 12 x 16 in.

Elizabeth Higgins

Elizabeth Higgins Across the River

2020, oil on canvas, 40 x 30 in.

Elizabeth Higgins

Mountain Reflection

2020, oil on canvas, 18 x 18 in.

Elizabeth Higgins

Open Window, St. Mawes

2020, oil on canvas, 40 x 30 in.

Albert Kresch

Albert Kresch Fences

c. 2014, acrylic and oil on canvas mounted on panel, 10 x 14 in.

Albert Kresch Dark Barn

c. 2011, acrylic and oil on paper mounted on panel, 22 x 30 in.

Albert Kresch

New Albany, Pennsylvania Farm

c. 2003, acrylic and oil on paper mounted on panel, 10¾ x 29¾ in.

Stanley Lewis

Stanley Lewis

Yard in Summer

2015, oil on canvas, 18¼ x 28 in.

Courtesy Betty Cuningham Gallery

Stanley Lewis

Tree and Houses, Lake Chautauqua 2015, oil on canvas, 23½ x 36 in.

Courtesy Betty Cuningham Gallery

Stanley Lewis

Lake Chautauqua Boat Scene with Woman and Boy

2013, oil on canvas, 21¾ x 31 in.

Courtesy Betty Cuningham Gallery

Elizabeth O’Reilly

Elizabeth O’Reilly

Green Tanks, Red Hook

2019, watercolor collage on paper, 9 x 12 in.

Elizabeth O’Reilly

Single

2019, oil on panel, 10 x 8 in.

Elizabeth O’Reilly

House and Boat, Vermont

2019, oil on panel, 11 x 15 in.

Tony Serio

Tony Serio

Spring, Distant Rain

2015, oil on linen, 48 x 56 in.

Tony Serio

Under Riverside Drive

2017, oil on linen, 26 x 32 in.

Tony Serio

Winter Park Landscape

2020, oil on linen, 22 x 30 in.

Kamilla Talbot

Kamilla Talbot Pool Margin

2020, watercolor and screenprint on paper, 22 x 30 in.

Kamilla Talbot

Four Corners

2020, watercolor and screenprint on paper, 22 x 30 in.

Kamilla Talbot

Snowy Route 29

2020, watercolor and screenprint on paper, 22 x 30 in.

Our thanks to Roger Braimon and Christina Maile of the Westbeth Artists Residents Council, to Westbeth Visual Arts Chair and Gallery Director Mourrice Papi, and to Alexandre Gallery and Betty Cuningham Gallery.

Special thanks to Karen Wilkin: for her selection of work, her catalog essay and lecture, and especially for her unflagging support and guidance in the organization and installation of this exhibition.

Right:

William Christine

Meadow Study 2 (detail) 2019, watercolor, 12 x 9 in.

Back cover:

Kamilla Talbot

Blueberry Bushes

2020, watercolor and screenprint on paper, 22 x 30 in.

WESTBETH GALLERY · 55 BETHUNE STREET, NEW YORK, NY 10014 · WWW.WESTBETH.ORG