The onset of spring this year coincides with two exhibits of
abstract painting at Greg Kucera
which take plant life as their subject and inspiration. Despite their shared
affinity for things botanical, it would be difficult to find two bodies of work
more temperamentally and temporally dissimilar than Alden Mason’s Burpee Garden
series from the early 70s and Anne Appleby’s recent paintings, both on view
through March 29th.
Plants, like all living things, possess essences that are
always present yet forever changing form. These may, in dormancy or youth, go
unnoticed for months or years before suddenly stopping us unexpectedly in our
tracks with bold outline and vibrant color. If Appleby’s juxtaposed panels of
color represent the timelessness of their genetic substance, Mason’s exuberant,
colliding forms manifest their staggering physical potential.
As their title suggests, Mason’s paintings are improvisations
on memories of images from the famous seed catalog that played a role in the
artist’s early life on a Skagit
Valley farm. Considered
by many to be the pinnacle of his artistic achievement, they also marked the
end of his use of oils; the process of creating these paintings -- using oils diluted
with various thinners and varnishes to create a watercolor-like effect on a
grander scale -- was so debilitating to his health he was forced to abandon the
medium in favor of acrylics.
The allure of seed
catalogs is that they present the farmer or gardener with depictions of plants
at their absolute peak of bloom, fruiting or foliage. Often rendered or
manipulated to the point of idealized fecundity, they are reigned in by the
pamphlet’s categorical arrangement by genus, species, and variety. When
reproduced on the seed packets themselves, they represent the hopes and
expectations contained within the small, unremarkable objects inside. It is
this phenomenon of transformation that Mason’s large paintings capture, and the
effect is spelled out in their fantastic Burpee seed titles: Brown Bingo, Burpee Surprise Package, Rainbow
Rocker, Dandelion Day, and Golden Burpee.
Mason’s Burpee Garden
paintings dramatize select moments in time. The loose, varyingly translucent
areas of intense color bleed together at the margins, suggesting light
filtering through overlapping membranes of leaves and petals. One senses the pulse
of life vibrating through their surfaces, like rampant growth on a hot summer
day.
Appleby’s paintings
– each a series of monochromatic rectangular panels in different shades – lack
the figurative and expressionist properties of Mason’s works. Each field of
color suggests a phase or section of the plant from which the work takes its
name. Taken together as a whole upon the wall, they establish a relationship to
one another similar to the cumulative one that might develop in the mind of the
seasoned gardener or attentive naturalist.
In Redbud, for example, we see four squares
of color: a deeply-saturated hot pink, a lustrous light green, a bright clear-yellow,
and a dull, textured gray. Anyone who has had the pleasure of seeing an actual
Redbud each day over the course of a year will immediately recognize these
colors (spring flowers, summer foliage, fall leaves, winter bark), the times of
year they represent, and -- most astonishingly – the quality of light produced
by the sky at the moment we first see them. Appleby’s unique color field paintings
may be about the essence of their stated subject, but they are more
significantly about the essence of ourselves; embodiments of our collective memory,
consciousness, and ability to understand the natural cycles of life.
Next door to Kucera at Foster/White,
there is another exhibit of Alden Mason’s work from the 80s to the present.
Some of the best paintings in the show, which also runs through March 29th,
were made just last year by the now 88 year-old artist.
artdishnorthwest forum on visual art
