RESIKA AND WELLIVER
by Joan K. Yanni
Last spring MAG’s Gallery Council voted to present a contemporary landscape painting to the Gallery in honor of the Council’s 60th anniversary. Two possible choices were displayed in our 20th century gallery, and Council members voted on their choice. The winner was Paul Resika’s Boats—Blue Square (99.41). The second painting, Dead Pine (99.40), by Neil Welliver, was deemed too good to pass up and was purchased with funds from the Council, Averell Council, and MAG art funds.
PAUL RESIKA summers in Provincetown and paints the color and light that permeate the Cape. The vivid blue of our painting- -sky and sea become one- -stops the viewer in his tracks, and the black, green and red boats suspended on the canvas seem to become three-dimensional as one gazes at the picture. The triangle above the boats—a sail?—adds a surprising see-through element to the otherwise solid shapes.
Born in New York City in 1928, Resika had his first studio on the top floor of his father’s electrical motor shop. His mother, an art lover, encouraged him to “use color like Rubens,” and at 12 he began to study art with Sol Wilson, a family friend. Another family friend introduced him to Hans Hofmann. With Hofmann he learned to capture color, light and movement on the surface of a painting.
Resika had his first one-man show when he was only 19; it consisted of work the critics called “semi- abstract,” abstract with recognizable shapes. Resika did not consider abstraction a complete lack of representation, but a purification of matter through a selection of details which clarify the essence.
In 1950 he left New York for Europe—Rome and Venice particularly captivated him. In Venice he studied at the Academy, discovering the colors of Titian and the water and atmosphere of Canaletto. Returning to the US in 1954 he found that Pop Art and Minimalism had overtaken Abstract Expressionism. Resika did not succumb to the new movements. In the mid ‘60s he moved to Wellfleet on Cape Cod, married there, and began to paint the Cape. His merging of sea, sky and land often makes Provincetown seem like Venice, floating on canvas. Resika prefers to paint calm, unruffled, reflective waters. His colors have a Fauvist intensity, lighting up dark spaces. In some recent paintings he has turned to night scenes; but even in these, the moody blue and purple shadows merely accent the bright hues of his subject.
Critic Clement Greenberg said of him, “The trouble with you, Resika, is that you have to make things beautiful. You’re afraid to make an ugly painting.” Resika likes to say that he wants to capture the feel, color and symbol of nature, not an exact reproduction. His vivid, painterly canvases testify to his success.
NEIL WELLIVER has been called one of the best landscape painters in America. Art historian Frank Goodyear, Jr., writes that "America has not seen a native landscape painter of the genius of Neil Welliver since Frederic Church."
Welliver was born in Millville, Pennsylvania, in 1929. Painting interested him even as a child, and he went on to earn a BFA from the Philadelphia Museum College of Art and an MFA from the Yale School of Art. He later taught at both institutions. His studies at Yale with Josef Albers gave him a firm grasp of color relations and led to his use of the square in his works, rather than the horizontal rectangles usually seen in landscapes. He first painted abstracts, then turned to figures, often nudes, in a forest setting. Later works omit the human and depict only the natural world that he knew intimately.
In the early '60s Welliver bought a farm in Lincolnville, Maine, and became part of a circle of realist Maine painters including Fairfield Porter, Alex Katz, and Rackstraw Downes. Welliver's landscapes spring from his abstract expressionist roots. They are large, filled with intense color and texture. He paints the Maine forests and waters in different seasons and various conditions of light, manipulating his colors to present his own view of nature. His pictures are crowded, yet every detail is clear. The grey and brown trees in MAG's painting create verticality, while sharp, blue shadows cut diagonally across the canvas and small, green shoots rise from the white snow.
Welliver's approach to painting is organized, methodical. He first paints a sketch of his subject outdoors, sometimes walking for miles, even in snow, to find the scene he wants. Back in his studio, he draws a large cartoon outline of his picture on a huge sheet of paper. Next he traces the lines of the cartoon with a serrated wheel that puts small holes in the paper. He tapes this perforated paper over a primed canvas and taps through the holes with a bag of charcoal dust to transfer the image onto the canvas. He begins to paint in the upper left hand corner of the canvas and executes a finished painting left to right, top to bottom. When a Welliver landscape is half finished, the top half is a completed oil painting and the bottom is white canvas with faint outlines. Once an area is painted, he never goes back to rework it. When he gets to the bottom of the canvas, he signs his name in the lower right corner and stops.
No comments:
Post a Comment