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 29^th, were made just last year by the now 88 year-old artist.