Laura Stewart
Art Quarterly, Summer 2000 |
|
In art, obsession with politics, sex, the neurotic psyche, industry,
technology, and ecology has rendered pure landscape art a quaint
tradition. Correct? Not when one looks at the work of three of the
most interesting landscape painters on the international scene today.
Alan Rankle's work is reminiscent of Ruisdael and Constable, and
Ørnulf Opdahl's of Munch and Strindberg, while Mikoto Fujimura's
landscapes marry the medieval Japanese Ni-honga tradition with Rothko's
Abstract Expressionism. All three artists are brilliant reworkers
of the classical landscape genre and each in his own way is fresh
and relevant, transforming paint on canvas into poetry rather than
just filling his work with 'concept'.
ALAN RANKLE
Alan Rankle became passionate about landscape painting while studying
at Goldsmiths' College in the 1970s. Today, he is still working
and reworking a theme which melds classical, Claude-style Arcadianism
with a Dutch restraint and a meditative quality drawn from his studies
of Classical Chinese Chu'an Buddhism. He paints subjects in series
- for example, Riverfall and Terre Verte - constantly revisiting
a theme based on a specific well-loved place of inspiration. His
works have a reflective, shimmering quality in which glimpses of
trees, ponds, rivers, skies, and other natural imagery seem to come
into focus and then disappear as one gazes at his work. His landscapes
are not about simple melodies; they become, like a successful jazz
session, infused with spiritual energy and a barely restrained sexuality.
Sometimes, Rankle's devotion to capturing transcendent fleeting
moments in nature can become chaotic, and his colours can turn acidic
and jarring. Yet his efforts achieve what many great landscape painters
seek - the ability to capture emotion and filter it through the
natural world to bring the viewer moments of longed for peace.
MAKOTO FUJIMURA
Makoto Fujimura was born in Boston, and educated in the United
States and Japan. He is both a boldly abstract and a conceptual
painter, yet makes his own paints according to medieval Japanese
methods. He mixes vermilion, malachite, cinnabar, gold, silver,
and oyster shells with animal-skin glue in order to create a palette
that is quietly luminous and closer to nature than those created
using commercially available paints. He then applies colour to mulberry
gampi paper which floats over a canvas stretched across large wooden
frames. The result is delicacy on a monumental scale. Fujimura at
first glance looks like a Colour Field painter, yet when one peers
more closely, fleeting lines from the Bible, fruits (especially
quince), cherry blossoms, and rivers of pigment softly wash across
the canvases.
Fujimura is a committed Christian and a theologian - an anomaly
in today's secular art world. As one New York critic wrote, 'It
is mildly startling to find someone today referring to Isaiah's
"crown of beauty ... and garment of praise" and meaning
it.' Examples of Fujimura's work have been installed in St John
the Divine Cathedral on Manhattan's Upper West Side, the largest
Protestant cathedral in the world. Now that New Yorkers have a chance
to see this contemplative painter's work in the sacred hush of this
neo-Gothic monument, it will certainly become highly sought after.
ØRNULF OPDAHL
The Norwegian painter Ørnulf Opdahl does not attempt to
provide relief from the harsh, dark, Nordic light. On the contrary,
he celebrates it. Opdahl delivers extraordinarily complex surfaces
with a limited palette of greys, creams, silvers, and golds. His
works are deceptively simple, with straightforward titles like Grey,
Light Over the Mountain, Winter, and Hunter in the Snow. Their power
is to pull the viewer in to examine the detail of his masterly application
of many layers of paint and glazes, then to step back and become
awed by the majesty of his quietly forbidding landscapes. Opdahl
paints with an expressionistic force far removed from the Mediterranean
- which is not surprising, as he has always lived and worked in
Godoy on the northern coast of Norway. As one critic noted, 'Opdahl
is not a Sunshine and Sunday painter', but his luminist visions
of eerie northern light give one a visceral tug towards a place
in the world where wind tears rooftops away and the sea is an unfathomable
black.
What unites these three artists is their grounding in long-standing
traditions and the way in which they deconstruct and reinvent those
traditions. Yet none of the trio is merely a pastiche painter or
derivative; their sources are as varied as their backgrounds and
their current work is entirely new. |
