The Sherry French Gallery is excited to open its doors to the 15th annual “Mainely Maine” realist and representational art exhibit. The show features the varied landscapes of Maine as well as other vistas that occupy that space of wilderness in our minds. We return to this exhibit as we return to these places of intrigue year after year. The paintings, by Janice Anthony, Eliza Auth, Mary Baker, Theresa Bartol, Fred Danziger, Carolyn Edlund, Judy Evans, William Gonnotta, David Jermann, Victor Leger, Douglas Martenson, James Mullen, Gilbert Riou, Michael Schweigart, Dean Thomas and Gail Wegodsky, compel us to question why.
The ragged cliff side vistas, the expansive seascapes and the lush forest scenes that inhabit our walls stand in sharp contrast to the skyline visible from our gallery windows in Chelsea. We require this change of scene and the qualities that the wild has to offer. Some of the landscape paintings bring to mind purity and isolation. Others suggest a higher meaning or design may be derived from the untamed landscapes. However, the wild nature of the scenes keeps the answers hidden.
We seek natural resources from the wilderness and, more abstractly, the knowledge that something untarnished by our excesses still exists. Yet, as painter Janice Anthony writes, it asks us nothing.
Anthony, an exquisite realist artist, paints the remote corners of the forest -- those hardly tainted by the human eye. She offers us a glimpse into the hidden world of nature. We feel that her scenes, like our bedroom as a child where the toys came alive as soon as we turned away, live private lives of enchantment outside the human realm. Anthony is consumed with exploring these enigmatic spaces. Yet, she seeks the questions rather than the answers. “Order, meaning, structure; these are elements that cannot be found in the wilderness; it contradicts any explanation that human minds seek to impose on it. As a painter, I want to recognize the unknown, the mysterious and convey that quality.” As a result, Anthony’s paintings are able to retain that hint of magic that first called to her to the heart of the forest.
Carolyn Edlund brings to light a new landscape painting, set at sunrise, entitled “Quintessential Calm.” The windswept terrain is highlighted in purple and the shocking sky seems to have blown in from another world, yet the artist assures us that it is just a rundown farm near Hyde Park, New York. She photographed the site on a cloudy day and then pieced together the scene “from my amassed collection of photo references of skies – taken at all times of the day.” Edlund’s process of overlapping different moments in time works not to freeze a site at a specific instant, but to capture the “enduring beauty of nature.” The resulting color combinations might cause the viewer to doubt whether anything of our world could be so beautiful. Yet, even though we may be witnessing last month’s wildflowers superimposed on last evening’s indigo twilight and this morning’s sun, all of the ingredients are earthy. Like a master chef, it is Edlund’s combination of them that elevates us above the singular components, so that we land somewhere above the realm of day-to-day experience. We learn that we don’t have to look any further to find beauty that inspires us, just longer.
An outstanding realist painter of rugged terrain and water bodies, Dean Thomas’ expertise comes from his hands-on experience. The artist has had years of training in traditional landscape painting, but the adventuresome spirit of his work clearly springs from his wilderness exploits. A frequent backpacker and kayaker of Maine, Thomas finds that, “A large part of being a landscape painter is the journey.” As a result, his scenes are gnarled, complex records of the natural world, often with branches bending low over a path or rocks framing a streambed. They beckon us their way even as they warn us of the harsh realities of life in the wild. Thomas has devoted his career to painting the land that fulfills and challenges him, both as a hiker and as a painter. In this way, he writes, “My work is a record of a life well lived.”
Eliza Auth understands that nature is what we bring to it. Place is not only the physical, but also the expectations and definitions that the viewer projects onto it. Auth’s realist landscape paintings take on a dramatic mix of impressionistic strokes and sharply defined features in order to mirror the human experience of place, in which our eye jumps from one subject to the next, never focusing on the whole picture. In order to convey her personal experience of a landscape, she consults her memory as she works, thinking back to how it felt. “If I’m working on a painting of a windswept, deserted Maine beach, as in ‘Popham Beach in Winter,’ while I paint I’m thinking about how the wind stung my face and how difficult it was to use the camera with numb fingers, how cold the light was.” Often, effective works of art will strike a familiar chord in the viewer. Even if you have never visited Maine’s beaches or the dunes that line its shores, there is something so specific about the way that Auth paints them – evoking temperature, sea smells, gusts of wind – that you may get the sense that you have been there before.
Maine offers the mind a stage. The varied terrain – from mountains, to turbulent seas, to rolling hills – can be a playground for the whole range of our daydreams and desires to act themselves out. Face to face with these paintings of our country’s grand landscapes, the adventurer in us may decide to brave a dangerous cliff face; the isolationist may strike off on his own; the conqueror may carve something that is his from the raw substrate of the earth; the sentimentalist may revisit the summer cabin where he used to spend his days chasing minnows and nights listening to his grandfather’s bedtime stories about fairies and goblins; the romantic may dream of holding what matters close to him as a Nor’easter rattles the rafters and unfolds sheets of rain against the windows. Some of the paintings in “Mainely Maine” at the Sherry French Gallery offer you a wilderness narrative, while others simply provide the space for you to fill in the story.
For further information, contact Sherry French at 212 647 8867.
