Safran

de Niverville 1 Barbara Safran de Niverville Jan Avgikos, faculty advisor 01 March 2013 The Imagined Landscape The landscape is nothing more than a mediation on an evoked feeling, a metaphor of existential experience. (Yves Michaud qtd. in Lee: 63)1 In this paper, I would like to discuss several artists who bring their interior vision to the genre of landscape painting. The mediation of the natural environment as a subject interests me in the work of Charles Burchfield, Joan Mitchell, Peter Doig and Liu Dan. These artists embrace singular locations or subjects and transform them through their artistic processes, sparking the viewers imagination and emotional response. Although I was familiar with the watercolor paintings of Charles Burchfield some years ago, I was not aware of his mystical works where . . .the vegetative world becomes an anthropomorphic force. (Cotter) Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 20102 included a significant number of these

1 Yves Michaud Couleur, in Joan Mitchell: La Grande Valle, exh.cat. (Paris: Galerie Jean Fournier, Editions, 1984. pp 9-11; translation by James Scarborough.
2

June 24 to October 17, 2010. There is a slideshow of selected works available online at

<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/25/arts/design/ 25burchfield.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0>.

Safran de Niverville 2 whimsical paintings, which impress me with their quirky combinations of painted detail and graphic form. Burchfield was a natural ecstatic and also a chronic depressive. One of his distinctive conceptual innovations was a lexicon of some two dozen semiabstract designs meant to symbolize negative emotions. (Cotter) These curving and pointed lines transform what could have been prosaic paintings of Middle America into fantastic scenes throbbing with eerie emotions. Peter Schjeldahl described them as impassioned renderings of woods and meadows and humble townscapes in an audaciously styled near- abstraction that was influenced by Japanese and Chinese art. It is fascinating to see how Burchfield combined this with his other his influences, which ranged from childhood nature books, Arthur Rackhams Wagner illustrations, Lon Baksts sets for the Ballets Russes, and painting by Romantic artists like William Blake and Samuel Palmer. (Cotter) Dandelion Seed Heads and the Moon is perhaps my preferred image. The dandelion heads are depicted with loving delicacy, their numbers multiply to fill the foreground as if the viewer is lying in a field amongst them. A strange moon illuminates the scene, as a few tufts of dandelion fluff drift above in the air. Fir trees in the distance bend in the wind. The scene feels chilled, yet inviting. Perhaps it shows us the bliss of taking beauty, laced with anxiety, by surprise. (Schjeldahl) While visiting the Museum of Modern Art in New York last spring, I was struck by the vivacity of the two-panel painting Wood, Wind, No Tuba by Joan Mitchell. This luminous painting dominated the enormous lobby area of the museum. The simplicity of the blue and yellow color scheme, with the energy of the brushstrokes evokes sunlight on foliage in the heat

Safran de Niverville 3 of summer. One relives the impression of such a time from ones own memory, entering the joy of the moment when Mitchell created with paint on canvas. Researching her work further, I discovered her Grande Valle series, based on memories recounted to her by her friend, Gisle Barreau. This series develops the colors, brushwork and the approach of Wood, Wind, No Tuba to an even more engaging and emotional level. The chromatic lyricism of the paintings conveys a world of dreamlike innocence, nostalgia and sublime liberation.(Lee 62) I am drawn to the suggestion of dense growth and a profusion of flowers in brilliant summer light. Mitchell created the twenty-one paintings over a period of thirteen months from 1983 to 1984. The series followed the deaths of Mitchells sister, Sally, and the death of Gisle Barreaus twenty-eight year-old cousin, Jean-Philippe, with whom Barreau had spent her childhood days in the hidden, secret valley she described to Mitchell. Joan Mitchell commented, Painting is the opposite of death, it permits one to survive, it also permits one to live. (Michaud qtd. in Lee: 63)3 Gisle Barreau wrote in her poem La Grande Valle : Magical childhood land: harmony, refuge, shelter, tranquility. First concerts of insects, frogs, birds, zephyrs. A color-filled land: water green meadows, yellows, blues, cobalt violet, somber ditches, fritillaries by the thousands. Wind. (qtd. in Lee: 61) The energetic brushwork and the confidant application of pure color keep the work fresh. The canvas peeks through the paint in many small places, adding sparkle and life where the pigment is strong. This perfect marriage of mental calculation and free brushwork reveals 3 Conversation with Joan Mitchell, unpaginated.

Safran de Niverville 4 Mitchells thorough knowledge of her process. She knew exactly when to stop working on a canvas, one of my personal objectives. I find myself returning often to look at Peter Doigs landscape work. These paintings have been called tranquil, like a waking dream. (Saatchi) Off-beat colors, fluidly applied, add to the magical quality of many of Doigs paintings. The viewer is drawn into the image and its otherworldly quality. Using runs and drips in a somewhat similar manner has helped me to activate otherwise static compositions. The spontaneity of this technique counteracts my tendency to over embellish with details. At times, the drips function almost as a screen, partially obscuring the image underneath, and allowing me to further develop the essence of the image as I continue to work on it. Of his painting Blotter, showing his brother walking on flooded ice, Doig has said: The title refers to (amongst other things) the notion of one's being absorbed into a place or landscape, and to the process through which the painting developed: soaking paint into the canvas. The figure is deliberately shown looking down into the reflection; this is to suggest inward thought, rather than some sort of contemplation of the scene. (Walker) In a similar work, Reflection (What Does Your Soul Look Like), the figure is almost entirely eliminated as we contemplate pink reflections in a puddle of melting snow. Doig uses a full palette to create vibrant night scenes reflected in dark water in Music of the Future and Echo Lake. At times, he enlivens a painting using swatches of pointillism in between freer brushwork, as in White Canoe. Peter Doig uses old photographs and memories of his Canadian childhood as source material for his etchings and oil paintings. He creates the etching before working on the image as

Safran de Niverville 5 a painting. (TateShots) In my case, photography often serves as a reference for my work. Instead of making etchings from my photographs, however, I have found that analytical drawing from a photo frees me to discover and express the essentials of the subject in a spontaneous, gestural painting later on. There is a transformation from observed qualities to livelier interpretive work. Liu Dan is an artist I became aware of in the Fresh Ink: Ten Takes on Chinese Tradition exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which featured ten contemporary Chinese artists and the traditional Chinese artworks they had studied and interpreted.4 For this project, Liu Dan chose to work from a celebrated Ying rock known as Honorable Old Man, which owes its name to its shape. Liu Dan has commented that rocks are the very stem cells of Chinese landscape paintings. . .(because) they hold the myriad forms of nature and their ability to transform is infinite. A microcosm of nature, a good rock evokes shenyou, imagined travel, leading an individual to inner harmony with the underlying order of the cosmos. (Sheng 103 -04) For the Fresh Ink show, Liu Dan produced nine larger than life portraits of the Old Man Rock. The tenth painting is an imagined landscape mounted as a nearly thirty-foot handscroll, Ten Differentiated Views of the Honorable Old Man (Sheng 112 -17). What is remarkable is the way that Liu Dan has interpreted and exaggerated the textures, curves and indentions of the rock and then painted a rich mountain landscape in traditional Chinese ink techniques. He studies the rock minutely in pencil drawings, then moves on to reinvent it in ink painting, creating a mindscape, a continuum between the painters mind and nature. . . . Each peak, each slope is individually expressed; convincing the viewer that this mountain range could exist in reality somewhere. We imagine ourselves exploring and climbing its outcrops and

4 November 20, 2010 to February 13, 2011.

Safran de Niverville 6 ledges, looking through mist and clouds towards the other side, hidden from our present view. (106-108) Perhaps it is the anthropomorphism in Charles Burchfields mystical work that resonates with me, just as the dream-like nostalgia of Peter Doigs paintings inspires me to interpret instead of illustrate in my new work. Joan Mitchells Grande Valle suite motivates me to be bolder in the application of paint and to make more use of the textures of paint and canvas. The inherent quality in Liu Dans work of both the physical and the spiritual resonates for me on a different level. The grace and beauty of his imagined landscape helps me to find tranquility in its contemplation, a quality that viewers have noted in my landscapes at various showings of my work. All of these artists share an intuitive approach to their painting practice, which I am drawing upon more confidently as I move through the Master of Fine Arts program. The theoretical bases and textual research contribute greatly to this process in providing a solid foundation for studio work, but I have found that over-planning a work can interfere with some of its greatest attributes. During an interview with Jan Thorn Prikker, Gerhard Richter commented: . . . If I work methodically, it just doesnt work. A picture has a logic that cant be verbalized until afterwards; it cant be designed. We talk about thinking a thing over, meaning over again, afterwards. I am more and more aware of the unconscious process that has to take place while one is painting as if something were working away in secret. . . .(Obrist 195-96)

Safran de Niverville 7 Works Cited British Museum. Liu Dan in Conversation with Philip Dodd. audio MP3. 04 May 2012. Web. 27 Feb. 2013. <http://www.britishmuseum.org/channel/events/2012/ audio_liu_dan_in_conversation.aspx>. Cotter, Holland. Nature Up Close and Personal. New York Times. 24 June 2010. Web. 01 Feb. 2013. Doig, Peter. Blotter. 1993. Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, UK. Web. 26 Feb. 2013. ---. Echo Lake. 1998. Oil on canvas. Tate Gallery, London, UK. ---. Music of the Future. 2002-07. Oil on linen. Collection of the artist. ARTstor. Web. 01 March 2013. ---. Reflection (What Does Your Soul Look Like). 1996. Oil on canvas. Victoria Miro Gallery. Web. 01 March 2013. ---. White Canoe. 1997. Oil on canvas. Saatchi Gallery. Web. 01 March 2013. Lee, Yvette Y. Beyond Life and Death: Joan Mitchells Grande Valle Suite. The Paintings of Joan Mitchell. Ed. Jane Livingstone. New York: Whitney Museum of Art. 2002. Print. Livingstone, Jane, ed. The Paintings of Joan Mitchell. New York: Whitney Museum of Art. 2002. Print. Mitchell, Joan. Wood, Wind, No Tuba. 1980. Oil on canvas, two panels. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Web. 24 Feb. 2013. Obrist, Hans-Ulrich, ed. Gerhard Richter, The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings and Interviews 1962 1993. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 1998. Print. Saatchi Gallery. Peter Doig artists profile; Peter Doig Exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery.

Safran de Niverville 8 Web. n.d. Web. 26 Feb. 2013. <http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/ peter_doig.htm>. Schjeldahl, Peter. Life in a Small Town. New Yorker. 05 Jul. 2010. Web. 01 Feb. 2013. Sheng, Hao. Fresh Ink: Ten Takes on Chinese Tradition. Boston: MFA Publications. 2010. Print. Tate UK. TateShots: Peter Doig. Issue 12. 01 March 2008. 5 min. 46 sec. video. Web. 25 March 2013. <http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/ tateshots-peter-doig>. Walker Museum of Art, Liverpool, UK. Blotter, Peter Doig, 1993. Oil on canvas. Web. 27 Feb. 2013. <http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/ walker/collections/20c/doig.aspx>