A hint of nature characterizes today's abstract landscapes; works subtly evoke a sense of time and place
Art Business News, Feb, 2005 by Laura Meyers
A wisp of a cumulus cloud in the sky. A hint of a horizon line. A bit of green suggesting the leaves of trees, perhaps rustling in the wind.
The play of light and shadow, color and shape on the canvas--for a century the province of nonobjective abstractionists--now has come full circle, as contemporary landscape artists have turned their attention to abstraction.
Traditional painters, it is said, paint the view of the countryside as seen through the window. Modernist painters painted the window itself--the relationships between its shapes, colors, patterns and textures. Their paintings were about painting. Later, conceptual artists abandoned both painting and windows.
Now, with the huge resurgence of interest in paint as a medium, today's abstract artists are once again looking through the window at the landscape beyond its panes. However, these artists are not reproducing exact representations of those vistas. Rather, in this country and abroad, more and more artists are creating "landscape" paintings that allude to the rural countryside, but which have few specifics, only references to earth morphing into water, mountains or sky. The work often doesn't recreate an exact rendition of a particular location on canvas, but rather an artist's loose memory or feeling about nature, expressing its essence or spirit.
Today, "a lot of artists are looking inside themselves for inspiration, evoking memory, sometimes in an ethereal and atmospheric way," observes Lexington, KY, art dealer Ann Tower. "One of my artists, Nancy Cassell, calls it 'painting the wilderness within,' but I think it applies more broadly to this entire genre."
"Indeed," adds Peter Mendenhall, co-owner of the Mendenhall Sobieski Gallery in Pasadena, CA, which represents a half-dozen abstract landscape painters. "For these abstract artists, the external world is mediated by internal feelings."
Consider artist Ilona Zaremba's recent landscape paintings. She uses layers of hot beeswax tinted with oil paint and pigments, in bright hues of yellow, red, brown and orange, to make abstract works with texture and dimension. "You can make out the horizon line,' observes her art dealer, Marsha Child, owner of Marsha Child Contemporary in Princeton, NJ. "In Ilona's work, sometimes you can make out other elements, like trees. She always includes elements of nature, but it's very soft."
Or, take the case of Nicholasville, KY, artist Patrick Adams, who paints what he calls spiritual landscapes derived from memory. Adams received a grant to travel in France, and later painted abstract landscapes evoking the experience. "It wasn't so much how France looked," Adams told a reporter. "There are trees and grass and hills, not unlike Kentucky, but I was looking for the constant patina, the interaction of people and landscape that has taken place for thousands of years."
Adams, who is represented by the Ann Tower Gallery, makes his colorful paintings by applying several layers of acrylic and oil, then scraping the paint away, and repainting. He repeats this process until the image and the surface become luminous and almost chimerical. In "Canaan's Hill" the soft pinkish-blue of the sky merges into the green and yellow earth, which in turn melds into the bright, almost sapphire water. In "Arcadia," the sky is gold, the horizon is lavender and blue, and then the earth layers down to red and green. "These paintings are very thick and rich," observes Tower. "Patrick was looking for a metaphorical way to express the fact that many people and civilizations had occupied these lands--the layers of paint refer to the layers of humanity. But the fact that they have a distinct horizon line--there is no way you would look at them and not think they were landscapes."
Los Angeles-based Dutch artist Luc Leestamaker's landscape paintings also blur the distinction between abstraction and representation. "I call them inner landscapes, rather than abstracted landscapes" says Leestamaker. His inspiration comes from abstract painter Mark Rothko, whose enormous paintings of the late 1940s and 1950s, presented almost bare canvases whose subject matter was reduced to the color, and, conversely, 17th-century Dutch landscape painters such as Salomon van Ruysdael and Jan van Goyen. Like Adams, Leestamaker layers his paint, but in a translucent "veil," which almost reflects the color back to the observer.
"Luc Leestamaker is one of the top abstract painters working today" says Lisa Levin, owner of New River Fine Art in Fort Lauderdale and Naples, FL. "He started out with a lot of angst and anger in his work. But Luc evolved toward the landscapes, which are more peaceful and serene, as he worked through some personal crises. He became more at peace with himself, and you can see that in this work, which is quite ethereal. Technically, he works with an under-painting technique from the old masters, which gives his work the depth you see."
Like Leestamaker, Zaremba and Adams, many abstract artists working today are, as London-based painter Anne Stahl says, "inspired by the natural world." But they use a variety of methods and styles to abstract Arcadia.
For example, Stahl's highly textured paintings have numerous layers of pigment and wax. Similarly, artist Joanne, who works in Surrey, England, uses paint with collage and mixed media to gain both texture and depth in her abstract landscapes. Lizzie Gregory, a self-taught artist represented by Art @ 94 in London, blends paint with mixed media to create textured landscapes and seascapes. "I concentrate on catching the freedom of the flowing world, using an uninhibited palette of colors," Gregory explains.
Southern California artist Ray Turner, who exhibits at several galleries including Mendenhall Sobieski, utilizes the horizon line as a composition demarcation, defining the proportion of land to sky. His abstract landscapes are metaphors for life, with paths and waterways representing the journey. Mendenhall Sobieski also exhibits Vancouver artist David Burns, who paints abstracted vistas of British Columbia's Sunshine Coast, and Leigh Liyun Wen, who paints a base coat of pigment, allows it to dry, and then adds layers of color. To complete the canvas, she uses a stylus to carve into the paint, subtracting from darkness to light.
Colorado painter Elizabeth Eking, one of several abstract landscape artists represented by Lydon Fine Art in Chicago, is "fascinated by the view from high places." Her helicopter-pilot husband flies her over fields, forests and mountaintops, and she has become "completely enamored by the sheer abstract beauty of the aerial landscape." Elting takes photographs while in the air, says art dealer Douglas Lydon, and then later "paints in interesting, abstracted patterns that are based on the odd angles she captured above. It's very fresh and interesting, as if it is God's view looking back on earth."
Lydon also exhibits abstracted landscapes and near-abstract landscapes by Stephen McClymont, Stephen Dinsmore, Trevor Bell, Maria Olivieri Quinn, and Patrick Adams. "Probably two-thirds of my artists are landscape-related now," notes Lydon, "and, frankly, I'm showing much more abstract work now than I ever had. I don't know if the market has changed, or if my taste has grown more sophisticated."
Unlike Elting's paintings, where the landscape is clearly perceivable, if not truly representational, Quinn's abstracts only tenuously suggest that they are landscapes by their titles. "Glacier" is deep blue, alluding to Arctic ice, while "Bird's Eye View," suggests the green patterns of a treetop seen from above. Quinn superimposes as many as 15 layers of translucent-colored glazes on her canvases.
McClymont's newest body of work reflects his life on an island owned by his wife's family. "Stephen adores scuba diving because under water, the light turns from angular to curvaceous," explains Lydon. In his abstract paintings he captures the feeling of tropical waters and underwater landscapes. Influenced by artists Robert Motherwell and Joan Mitchell, McClymont uses the strong, gestural brushstrokes of the post-war Abstract Expressionists. But he also uses color as a subject in and of itself, with blue changing to azure changing to indigo--and light shimmering off the canvas itself, as it would on the ocean.
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