HALSEY MCKAY GALLERY

The genre of landscape painting comes with a highly traditional and codified set of expectations which have existed within painting traditions in the state of Maine where Eleanor Conover, Lauren Luloff and Tessa G. O’Brien currently reside. These three artists carry this dichotomy into their approaches using materiality, felt perception and observation as guides.

Eleanor Conover’s shaped canvases make me think of the way water flows over stone. Over time, the repetitiveness of the changing tides leave their marks, their indentations, their grooves and ultimately shape the rocks. This synthesis of organic and structural is at the core of Conover’s work. Having spent many summers in the quarries of Maine, Conover draws inspiration from the structural elements of rock formations and begins the construction of her paintings with a sketch. Like an architect mapping the armature of their building the sketch is the guiding force as she begins to work. Once determined, the supports are then built, fabric is dyed and prepped, repeatedly ironed, sewn together and then stretched. Only at this point does painting begin. Deeply influenced by the blocky paint application and brash use of negative space in Cezanne’s watercolor drawings, Eleanor’s remembered experiences of nature take hold as she paints her surfaces.

Lauren Luloff’s work thrives within the boundaries of her immediate surroundings. She is inundated with, dare I say, the sublime landscape that is her coastal home in Lubec, Maine. However, these are not paintings wrought with romantic adoration. They challenge the viewer with a myriad of visual information and personal process. She creates an homage to her surroundings through taming the unwieldy and unpredictable relationship between dye and silk. The effect and mastery of this material combination brings to mind the washy paint application of Helen Frankenthaler. Sewing the delicate silk together then painting on it with dye each piece of fabric is a painting unto itself. Figures, local flora and fauna, the sea outside her studio window are all represented along with stripes and grid-like patterns. Lauren creates her own version of a vivid landscape rich with personal inquiry and reverence for her surroundings.

Tessa’s paintings sizzle with urgency. Constructed with sewn together, dyed pieces of canvas, her paintings take shape with the application of wax resist, bleach and oil paint. This combination of materials along with Tessa’s feather light brush work gives the paintings a sensual and fantastical effect. Tessa is obsessive in her love of place. She finds a locale and returns to it over and over again to paint and absorb the surroundings. This specificity of environment (she often titles her work with the location) coupled with her painting style creates an unique atmospheric haze which lingers over her surfaces – an other worldly aura akin to the work of Charles E. Burchfield. Working in her studio and observationally in the landscape, one can sense O’Brien’s drive to capture what is fleeting in nature combined with an inquisitiveness of what binds her to that moment.

Traditional landscape painting is horizontal in its presentation to the viewer. It is precisely painted through observation defined in direct and literal terms. The work in this exhibition wrestles with artistic traditionalism while pointing to alternative approaches. At its core this exhibition celebrates the richness of connection – the artists’ connection to one another as contemporaries, their connection to the site from which inspiration is drawn and our collective connection to the rich and wrought art historical context of landscape painting.