Date: Fri 19-Jun-1998

Publication: Bee

Author: SUZANN

Quick Words:

Grimes-landscape-artist-Weir

Full Text:

A Rebirth For The "Retrograde" Art Of Landscape Painting

(with cuts)

BY SUZANNA NYBERG

ROXBURY -- Margaret Grimes, a painter and professor at Western Connecticut

State University, believes that as the world is rushing toward an

environmental Armageddon, the art world is experiencing a resurgence of

landscape painting.

"We no longer know what is natural and what is not," she said. "We don't know

if the day is hot because it's hot or because of global warming. But artists,

especially Americans, have a preoccupation with the land."

Speaking recently as part of the Artists Lecture Series at Weir Farm in

Wilton, Professor Grimes said she believes landscape painting, although

considered embarrassingly retrograde in this century, is a form to which

artists constantly return.

"It is the single most significant topic studied today, despite the

discouragement from the art world," the artist said.

Because the hierarchical art world has not wholeheartedly embraced her work

and others seem not to paint in a similar vein, Professor Grimes brought her

work back to The Blue Mountain, an avant-garde SoHo gallery.

Professor Grimes, who resides in Roxbury, says her work has moved toward

capturing nature in all its intensity. She began as a figure painter, then

moved to painting still lifes and views from a window before entering the

out-of-doors and venturing into the woods. Noting a gendered difference

between landscape painters -- where men paint in the wilderness and women

paint nature from inside their homes -- the professor says she has gotten off

her porch and is now totally immersed in the outside world.

This immersion involves painting that is not always considered beautiful. "I

felt funny doing many of these paintings," she said, pointing to a work with

vines running up a tree and thick brambles on the ground. "But I felt that it

was important to look at the complexity of nature and show the strange spatial

relationships it often entails."

Professor Grimes found herself wanting to emulate nature, doing what she

witnessed other creatures doing. "The birds were making better compositions

than I," she said, as she showed "Pond Brook: Newtown," a work that attempted

the weaving that birds do so adroitly when making their nests.

Professor Grimes believes her vision differs from traditional landscape

painters because she is conscious of working in an environmental context.

"Landscape painters deal with the environment," she said, "although they are

not always environmentalists." Her work attempts to forget about history and

look at nature without reference to a tradition, making an artistic experience

as authentic as the original observation.

Traditionally, Professor Grimes says, man's relation with the natural world

contrasted with his depiction of it in landscape painting. Many artists

separated the land from the human figures within it; Botticelli, for example,

created landscapes, ones where he consciously turned the land into an

environment, and was castigated by Leonardo da Vinci for doing so. "Landscape

painting sometimes looks like what nature is like," Professor Grimes said.

"But more often it does not."

Professor Grimes takes issue with the notion that man is at the center of the

environment and with the word environment itself. "If `environment' signifies

surroundings, then something has to be at the center of it," she said. "This

definition fosters the idea that we're the center."

Noting that astronomy did away with that belief five centuries ago, Professor

Grimes believes that the biological and natural sciences must head in that

direction. Since sixty percent of the biomass of the Eastern seaboard has been

destroyed, she wonders what the environment of animals must be like if we are

finally pausing to consider that ours is in trouble.

Arguing that much of human history has been the attempt to control primeval

nature, Professor Grimes suggests that representations of nature reflect our

cultural assumptions.

Cave painting, for example, involves the artist as a shaman, trying to control

the outcome of the hunt and tame an unbridled nature. Many landscape

paintings, whether by Constable or Cole, show a nature that has been tamed,

with trees cut down and plowed fields. Words, such as panic and pandemonium,

coming from the wood god Pan, and bewildered, reflect our real attitude, our

misgivings, toward nature, she feels.

"In our inner bones, we are terrified of unbridled nature," Professor Grimes

said. "And we should be."

Yet representations of nature changed dramatically with the advent of the

industrial revolution in the 18th Century. "The perception of nature as

fragile is recent," she said. "Our experience of nature traditionally is

overwhelming."

Only in the last 200 years have we been able to conquer nature, and this

conquest has made nature so fragile that it has become an artifact, something

to be hung on the walls, says the artist. Even more frightening for Professor

Grimes is the pervasive feeling of nostalgia for what has been lost. "One

cannot get nostalgic for what is still there," she said.