neil welliver

Caught up yesterday in my failed trip to New Hampshire and pointless arguments, I did not see the news that Neil Welliver had died until this morning.  Terry Teachout has a warm and funny remembrance, while the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Boston Globe run obituaries.  From the Times:

In the mid-1960's, Mr. Welliver began painting large-scale pictures of nude female models in forest settings. Exhibited to critical acclaim at Alexandre Gallery in 2001, those pictures were animated by tension between the realistic illusions of nature and human bodies on the one hand and the surface patterns of wide brushstrokes, on the other. By the mid-70's, Mr. Welliver had eliminated the figure from his work. Typically, he would paint outdoor studies of trees, grass, snow, rocks and streams encountered in places around his home and then translate the small paintings onto large canvases in the studio. Rendered with emphatic, generously paint-loaded brushstrokes, the myriad details filling the picture would create a kind of sensory overload of representational lucidity and abstract texture.

Of all the types of modern artistic practice, landscape has probably meant the most to me.  Its emergence is one of those indicators of the beginnings of modern ways of thought, while its nineteenth century glories opened a key path to abstraction.  I'm sure some reading this are rolling their eyes a bit, for at some already-distant point, landscape became to be seen by many as a type of old fuddy-duddy art.  Even before the expansion of contemporary media made painting in general seem old hat, the derogatory remark "mired in landscape" was used to describe abstractions deemed unsuccessful or insufficiently modern.

But I like it.  The type of tension between representation and abstraction the Times quote describes in Welliver's work is one sort of interplay that can make it engaging.  And underlying it all is the attempt, whether delusional and futile, or obvious and taken for granted, of illuminating our relationship to the world.  This line of thought is easily derided, the classic caricature being sophisticated urbanites idealizing nature by looking at landscape paintings in busy museums.  Certainly a real phenomenon, but not the only or whole story.  A while back I posted a quote from Erazim Kohák's great book, The Embers and the Stars: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Moral Sense of Nature.  It is what the title describes, an exercise in applied phenomenology: Kohák gives an account of his experience living in New Hampshire, where he built a house for himself alone in the woods.  He alternates between theoretical argument and close observations of nature, illuminating the former by the latter, showing how philosophy might arise out of literally natural ground.  It's an extraordinary achievement, and one doesn't need to accept all of his conclusions to think so.  Like some landscape painting does, it demonstrates a more profound engagement with the world and our place in it than facile dismissals allow.  I know I quote Howard Nemerov here to the extent of self-parody, but I can't help but also remember lines from the conclusion to his great poem, "The Blue Swallows": "O swallows, swallows, poems are not / The point.  Finding again the world, / That is the point . . .".

I regret to say that I have yet to see as much of Welliver's work as I'd like.  I know I've seen one by him at the MFA, and perhaps RISD.  The image above is of a large painting I spent quite a bit of time with when I visited the Currier a few months ago.  It's been on my mind lately, as I've been planning to return soon.  The web of the thicket makes the eye move across the surface, while the momentary stare of the deer works to fix it in place.  It's an entrancing work, and felt especially at home in a museum in northern New England.  I'll be sure to go see it again soon.

Comments

[Cynthia]

Oh, god, when will it stop??? Neil Welliver is one of my very favorite artists. I think you'd like his work a lot. He understands how a fish can fit in a stream, for example, and a stream in a wood. And do it in watercolor, just about the most difficult medium to do well. Put ideas of English watercolor style out of your head and think Cezanne. And think camouflage, and patterns.

I like landscape, too, and it was all I painted for years. Is good to study if you're an artist, any kind of artist because it doesn't sit still. I will dig out the title of a book for you -- something like "The New Landscape" that is good for what contemporary artists are doing with landscape.

Think Rackstraw Downes, Yvonne Jaquette, Alexis Rockman. None of them fuddy-duddies.

[Rufus Foshee]

Teachout needs definately to see more Welliver and to get rid of his romantic rose colored glasses. Noboby ever call O'Keeffe a landscape painter and there is much in common between Welliver's and O'Keeffe's approcah to their surrounding.

I wrote "When Is A Landscape Just a Landscape" for the FREE PRESS, Rockland, Maine Sept. 6, 2001 if you are interested. Best wishes, Rufus Foshee