Some notes from Richard Kirk Mills I found myself in unfamiliar
territory when asked by David Schell, the visionary behind Green Kill
to gather painters for an exhibit. I’m trying to become a painter
myself, not a curator.
My inclination is to look at painters around me for inspiration and
support.
Not really a theme show person, I selected people who start from
observation of the natural world and go from there.
So here in my view are six extraordinary upstaters who start with
perhaps some similar impulses, often in similar environs and end up in
very different places.
I am happy to introduce them to each other, though full disclosure –
the group includes two couples – and I look forward to the dialogues
their work sets up.
They extend traditions and articulate personal visions. All are in
search of something: peace, wholeness, release, the sublime, the
transcendence of the every day, maybe just a good days’ work. No
virtual stuff here: it’s all natural colored dirt. Their natures run
deep and with great character. And they’ve been at it for a long
time.
Scott, Kathmann and Lorenz frequently share an immersion in the woods,
among the trees, their great friends. That is, one feels surrounded;
in, a part of. Morris and Maguire pull us back to a vantage point
perhaps embedded in their English and Irish genes where we can again
imagine and dream. And Contes gives us the heat of the sun, refracted
into searing color. Like Greece in August, not much shade.
Artists
Victoria Scott . Victoria Scott’s woods are a domestic idyll:
trees, tilting ground and a studio clinging like a birdhouse to a
sleep slope, another layer the soft curves of the western Catskills.
Scattered about are more or less permanent easels; brightly painted
perches. She works ceaselessly outdoors and indoors by a single window
in the coldest weather. Her studio is lit by a string of white
Christmas bulbs. Her work ranges beyond the idyll into symbolism,
though the woodland paintings – in the hundreds – suggest a near
psychedelic quest to see and feel every possible arrangement of
changing light and pattern. Pinks, blues, green and grey are forever
shifting shapes. Paraphrasing Peter Schjeldahl of another original,
“she keeps her own counsel”. And that’s a good thing.
RICHARD KATHMANN . Kathmann, the peripatetic, always comes home. Home
to the family farm and the woods in the western Catskills. From
Brooklyn, Chicago, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Medellin Columbia, Georgia,
New Hampshire and Maine. From street theater to Tamarind’s litho
workshop, large scale drawings and intimate paintings, Richard’s
marks are like musical notation; nature’s song, observed,
abstracted, embraced and very personal. If you can imagine Lois Dodd
on one shoulder and Jake Berthot on the other. Richard seems from the
East, a green sage, an angel perhaps.
PATRICE LORENZ. Patrice Lorenz’s immersion is complete: emotional,
expressive and visceral. Her best work is near, kinetic; you’re
ensnared in wind, movement, brambles, tree branches, you’re prone in
a bed of flowers. But it’s paint, pastel, gesture, arm – It’s
allover, top to bottom sensuality. Nature and painting merge in a felt
unity. And she’s not afraid to go to the point of almost losing it.
The good kind of improvised explosive device. You can feel her working
something out.
WAYNE MORRIS. Wayne Morris’ subtle yet powerful landscape studies
seem faraway as if seen through time or memory. Like a detail glimpsed
through Morandi’s binoculars.
Mist, a patch of snow, a slash of valley green, the dull warm brown of
massed trees thinking about leaf-out, a rooftop shape, all drawn close
for us upon a united flat surface. A local realtor says there’s
magic in these Catskill mountains. These small tonal gems go beyond
that. Morris paints large too: figures, interiors, with a meditative
light. A calm interiority infuses all the work, a bulwark against
worldly agitation, no doubt a hard fought battle. This dude abides.
Anna Contes. Too bad Josef Albers was such a square. Had he studied
with Contes, he’d know much more about how color feels. She
maintains a cool control of really hot stuff. The heat of her native
Ikaria Greece vibrates through flowers, figures, fruit, gourds and the
Catskill landscape. Contes makes her own pastels, works in oil and egg
tempera. Cobalt violet sizzles next to yellow orange, magenta and
cerise vibrating with cerulean. A hot pink toned ground launches a
tree dancing amid fire. Better wear sunscreen. She has a broad range
of formats and goes from the single centered icon to overall marks,
from broad flat pattern to pointillist facture.
DOUG MAGUIRE. Doug Maguire’s modernism is sublime, but how does
that jibe? If you took Milton Avery’s simplified shapes and asked
Thomas Cole to flesh out the details what century would you be in?
Maguire’s landscapes are what you see when you close your eyes and
imagine “landscape painting”. These are in a grand tradition:
large, sweeping, panoramic VISIONS SINGLED OUT FOR US TO BELIEVE AGAIN
IN THE POWER OF EARTH, sky and water. His natural resources as a
painter give us back what the Hudson River School painters warned us
about: the disappearance of _our_ natural resources. Look up, look
down, look across. God may just be everywhere in the details.
RICHARD KIRK MILLS. As for me, I’m trying to be content with the
every day details. A view out the window, a corner of the studio,
the back yard garden, a neighbors house or barn, paintings on a wall,
the light on a meadow, the heat of summer. The trick is, how to make
it work as a painting? My disciplined and accomplished cohort here are
an inspiration for me to just keep looking and working the colored
dirt.
—Rick Mills
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06/08/2017 Last update