Commentary: Color as Construct and the Evanescence of Landscape

One of the great resources of Yale University is its Yale Center for British Art founded by Paul Mellon. The Center hosts permanent exhibitions of English landscape and equine artists of the 18th and 19th centuries, including paintings by Constable and Stubbs.

Accessing the quiet galleries located on the upper floors of the center designed by Louis I. Kahn, one enters into an altered sphere in coming face to face with the disembodied color reveries of Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851). In these pictures largely evoking landscape and maritime subjects, the treatment of substantive form dissolves into tenuous and haunting nuances of color and light.



The experience of coming into an almost touchable proximity with Turner’s surfaces allows one to study the artist’s brushwork. Close scrutiny reveals that Turner juxtaposed discordant abstract warm and cool color value gradients, subsuming them in washes of sheer oilated color. The result is a sense of quiet glitter and scintillation. Orchestrating a darkened Payne’s grey palette, Fingal’s Cave, painted in 1832, is a lustrous example of how Turner captures landscape and subsumes its structure through muted color to become an embodiment of atmosphere.

We meet this same sublimation of landscape overtaken by atmosphere in the sun stroked canvas Pinion Hills at Dawn, painted by California plein-air artist Clinton Johnson in 1926. I was immediately attracted to this canvas that glittered on the grass at a lawn sale a few years back. Bringing it back home, I was interested to find the artist’s name in my reference edition of Artists in California, 1786-1940, Vol. II, Hughes Publishing Company, 288. As an artist who enjoyed setting up his paintbox outdoors in the manner of Edgar Payne, Johnson was a resident of Los Angeles from 1922 through 1928, from where he traveled to painting sites in the Mojave and the San Bernadino Mountains. Johnson’s technique was marked by his ability to trowel on delicate rifts of blue and yellow paint using a palette knife. His work pays homage both to nature and to Turner through creating a sense of insubstantiation, transforming structure through color.



I admire Turner and am glad to find myself in possession of a small Johnson. Yet in my own work, I have been in pursuit of something different than these artists' objectives. In my large scale painting, Diptych I, I wanted to investigate a radical reduction of program and intention and concentrate on the mediation of colorants on a surface. For this work, I compounded paint as a means to explore optical reactive variants of close-knit color wavelengths. It was exciting to finally apply the paint after so much work was involved in achieving the correct chemistry, density and consistency.



In this work, horizontal and discrete color bands of cool green glazed malachite, lapis ultramarine and purple compounded with cochineal, recessively juxtapose and optically interact with aggressive hot ribbons of pure madder red.



After so much personal involvement with the work, it was something of a surprise to hear comments on how the vibration of color in this mural seemed to promote a sense of atmosphere and landscape in the minds of viewers. Nevertheless, the canvas remains a flat flag, composed of a set of broad color lines that interact on a stark pearlized canvas. Painted bands of color constitute its structure rather than any overt attempt to construct a landscape. Despite my intentions for this work, the collector of Diptych characterizes the canvas as his favorite view of “the torrid sunset one often sees on the Gulf of Aidan.”

Ars Ipsa Loquitur
Art speaks for itself.♦