Essays

"Perfectly Natural"

The H.F. Johnson Gallery of Art featured the exhibit "Perfectly Natural" Sept. 1-Oct. 13, 2007. The exhibit featured work by Charles Munch, Randall Berndt, Carol Pylant, Ann Worthing and Matthew Hagemann. The following essay was written for the exhibit's catalog by Fred Camper, an artist, writer and lecturer on art and film, who lives in Chicago. See the catalog.

Five Views of Nature

By Fred Camper

"Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?” Despite the “retrospective” nature of our age, “why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition,” Ralph Waldo Emerson famously asked at the opening of his 1836 essay Nature. The five artists in this show, consciously or not, each follow Emerson’s suggestion, defining their relationship to nature in unique ways. Three fit in to the Romantic outlook of Emerson that also informed the Hudson River School landscapes that began appearing in his own time, in which human consciousness and nature were seen as interpenetrating, as evocations of each other, while the other two rather pointedly stake out different terrain.

Matthew Hagemann

Matthew Hagemann is perhaps the purest Romantic of the five. He has studied architectural illustration and worked as an architectural draftsman, and first began selling prints of his black and white, rectilinearly precise renditions of famous Chicago buildings in frame shops and at outdoor art fairs when his architect employer died in 1990. Even though these drawings are not overly personal, he chose buildings whose “character” he liked. About seven years ago, he switched from architectural illustration to nature painting: “I think there’s much more life and spirit in nature,” Hagemann says.

For much of his life, this Chicagoan has been taking drives into the country, enjoying himself in “God’s cathedral” — using a term that the painters Church and Bierstadt would feel at home with. With their quirky bends and curves and dynamic, almost musical rhythms, his paintings are perhaps closest to those of Thomas Hart Benton, and Hagemann knows Benton’s work — but says he prefers Dali and Hopper.

Starting from photos he takes of landscapes in the flat Midwest, Hagemann unstraightens some of the lines. Day’s Beginning shows a lake bathed in the pink of dawn, the curvy shoreline seemingly cradling the water, the curves of land and trees echoing in streaks on the lake’s surface. His curves often collect in little nubs, never sharp but more acute than the slopes, adding a peculiarly individual dynamism. This is a landscape of imagination, of dreams, in which human subjectivity and nature have become fused. The tree that rises against the sky in Dream #3 has curves that are matched by the surrounding landscape and the clouds behind, lines dancing harmoniously with each other rather than seeming to collide, varied swoops and slopes creating a kind of mental swirl that gives a view of nature as being alive, not as an entity separate from humans but as something part of our inner lives.

Randall Berndt

The Hudson River School painters rarely showed nature as totally wild. Whether offering a balance between the wild and the settled landscape, as in Thomas Cole’s The Oxbow (1836), or showing the intrusion of a railroad, or simply including tiny figures in wilderness scenes, these contrasted the products of human civilization with wilderness, showing them as quite different entities. This point is also made in different ways by Randall Berndt and Charles Munch, two Wisconsin artists who are also friends.

Berndt grew up on a family farm 50 miles north of Madison, and his childhood spent in nature — “a kind of a Huckleberry Finn lifestyle, wandering hither and yon, fishing, building little forts” — remains a key inspiration. “Nature is my great teacher. My memories are not so much of people but of landscape, of patterns on trees, rocks and water.” But he lived in a world that’s “completely vanished” today, the close-knit community of his youth now “oddly fragmented” between factory farms, a new Amish community, and the huge new homes of exurbanites. From knowing nothing about art as a youth, he was painting “abstract Rothkoesqe clouds” in graduate school and then biomorphic forms, until, partly inspired by Wisconsin painters such as Munch, John Wilde, and Tom Uttech, he switched to his present figurative style.

Berndt is the first to point out that he’s not a photorealist, and in citing as a key inspiration a quote from Caspar David Friedrich about “seeing your picture first” with your “spiritual” rather than “bodily” eye, he places himself firmly in the Romantic tradition. Writing in the Wisconsin Academy Review, Richard Long suggests that Berndt’s painting is kin to “conjuring,” and with the inwardness of his light and his mysterious groupings of objects he does seem to be suggesting magical invocations of another world, each of his objects infused with an iconic suggestiveness. At the same time, his recent works have a clear theme: civilization and nature, including the most basic instinctual nature within us, are different and possibly incompatible realms, a theme suggested even in the title of Instinct and Shelter. A nude man sits on a log whose cut face is flat but whose huge ridges suggest wildness; before him is a precisely honed miniature house he has apparently made, while the hanging deer in the warm light of the rougher tent suggests something a bit wilder, and the dark background trees are wilder still.

Charles Munch

Childhood experiences of nature remain key for Munch as well. Growing up in the old St. Louis suburb of Webster Groves, he remembers the wild unoccupied areas in the middle of blocks, “kind of neglected backyards,” where he and his friends played. Even more important were childhood summers spent in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin. “It wasn’t organized rectilinearly,” Munch noticed early, unlike Webster Groves’s grid. “I had the freedom to spend whole days wandering over this little kingdom.” His realistic landscape paintings of the 70s led to a crisis in the early 80s. “I was trying to understand a lot of dichotomies I felt in my life, between emotion and intellect, representation and abstractions, the human world and the natural world, artists and everyone else. I didn’t feel I could express my feelings about landscape to my satisfaction with realism.” Early Renaissance painting, and the power of its intense colors — in contrast to Raphael, where “the color has started to be subsumed in the representational efforts" — was also important, as were also the children’s book illustrations and comic books of his childhood; he had been impressed by the variety of color shades possible on a comic book cover, as opposed to the inside.

In Munch’s paintings, the clash between the wild and the civilized is every bit as strong as it is in Berndt’s. Two Worlds shows a group of cemetery monuments in a clearing, trees in the background. The monuments are largely rectilinear and Euclidean, but betwixt and amongst them, a group of deer is crossing from right to left. The deer seem oblivious to the monuments’ presence, and the contrast is almost humorous. In Salvation, a couple seems to be carrying a stretcher out of a forest, and on it lays a deer — perhaps wounded, perhaps dead. There’s a contrast within the couple too: the woman, in a torn dress, stands on the forest floor, while the man, a bit more civilized looking, walks on meadow. The forest behind the woman seems dense and wild, while a plane flies at the upper left.

Munch’s schematic style, with broad areas of solid color that have a faint picturebook, even coloring book, quality, contributes to the speculative, even philosophical nature of his enterprise. Less than convincing representations of how civilization and nature really look, they present symbolic interactions between different layers of wild and tamed, encouraging the viewer to her or his own thoughts on the subjects.

Carol Pylant

Like Munch, Carol Pylant has made the transition from relatively realistic landscapes to a more symbolic style in the last decade, and with a similar gain in speculative questioning. Her recent paintings with animals in landscapes have a strangely surrealist aura, tiled floors adding a suggestion of great depth. In Interlude, a peacock copied from a photo she took struts across a checkerboard floor. Early Renaissance archways behind open out onto water and distant land, and in one archway a bird flies. The viewer might not guess that she was reading Dante’s Inferno at the time, but her comment that it’s not clear if the peacock is trying to get in or out makes sense, and one in general feels a heavy symbolic weight invested in the two birds, the floor, and the contrasting nature with its soft-edged hues, making the contrast between nature and culture even sharper visually than in Berndt or Munch. That the symbols are not specific, and the contrast between the rigid geometry of the architecture and the softness of nature, seem to break with traditional Romantic painting — it seems as if there is more than a single unified consciousness at work here, and the painting is as much about disconnections as about unities. The clashing worlds of Berndt’s and Munch’s paintings, by contrast, are unified by a consistent painterly style throughout.

Pylant, too, had formative early encounters with nature. Growing up in economically disadvantaged circumstances in the urban chaos of 1960s Detroit, she remembers the contrast with summers on her grandmother’s Tennessee farm — and saw nature as an escape. She was impressed in high school by the 17th-century Dutch paintings at the Detroit Institute of Arts, for “the way light was dealt with, the believability of space, the detail,” and their influence can be seen in some of her earlier work. In the recent paintings, the contrast between the Renaissance style tiled floors with their geometrical precision and the soft landscapes in the background is most impressive. The view through the arches, too, recalls the distant views toward infinity of Caspar David Friedrich, though Pylant says he’s not much of an influence. There’s some of the “distillation of light in space” from her “longest-running influence,” Vermeer. Her spaces, indeed, seem suffused with a mystical light, the ubiquitousness of which is heightened by the framing floors and archways — which also somewhat break with that light.

Pylant’s free-floating symbolism parallels Munch’s ambiguities. There are two dogs in Blessed, one inside the aches seemingly looking out and the other outside, beside the water, looking in. They suggest different human owners, and different positions in life. The knowledge that one dog is hers and the other, recently deceased, was her mother’s, and that the painting was inspired by the unexpected death of a friend, provides only one set of possible interpretations.

Ann Worthing

Ann Worthing presents nature somewhat differently from the other four artists. Her childhood experiences of nature include time spent on family farms, and also time spent with the family’s pets, including the “menagerie” her brothers kept while she was growing up in Wharton, Texas. Unlike the bright, seductive colors of the other four, Worthing’s are mixed with their complements. One inspiration is the paintings of Giorgio Morandi, which she discovered in the late 80s; another could be winters in her hometown: “Everything turned brown, and it was really monotonous. The land is very flat, and I learned to pay attention to subtle changes. I remember noticing different shades in the brown grass, and the way the grass took on colors from anything that might be around.”

Top Dog shows a pet she once owned, his back indeed arched and his stance direct and confrontational, but he’s painted in a pale cream that doesn’t stand out that much from the yellowish background. The cat in Pussy III seems drawn into himself, the way cats often are; self sufficient, his eyes seem to be staring out, but it’s not clear if they really are, and his pose is symmetrical, statuesque. His fur is paler than the green behind or the turquoise of the pool below, but it also feels as if each color can be seen in the other.

Worthing says that one reason for avoiding highly saturated colors is that she wants the paintings to change with the changing light around them. They indeed have a modesty, a lack of pride in themselves as paintings or in the objects they contain, that suggests an artist even less assertive about her role than the others. But if respect for nature means anything, it should mean knowing that it is not our property, nor is it even given to us to completely understand, and Worthing’s stance suggests a respect for her subjects as well as an openness to the changing environments they might be seen in. Nature is not a creature of her inner consciousness, but something that exists out there in the world, and changes in nature are not simply changes in our inner awareness, but also can reflect changes in that outer world.