Statement on Plein Air Painting

From the Curator's Statement; The Will to Endure - Catalog to the Exhibition, George Ohr Museum of Art, Biloxi, Mississippi, 2007.

In 2006, about a year after Hurricane Katrina, Marjie Gowdy, the director of the Ohr Museum of Art in Biloxi, Mississippi, asked me to curate a show from my own perspective as a ‘Plein-Air’ landscape painter. I was excited by the possibilities this show could represent; giving me the opportunity to bring together a diverse selection of artists’ work that would bear witness to both the relevance and endurance of landscape painting.

During the initial selection process I was asked to also participate in the show; to represent the Gulf Coast as an artist living and working here.  Although not an entirely orthodox position, my inclusion in the show will give some idea of the fusion of influences that develop an artist’s work, also giving me a strong focus to bring together artists’ work that I admire and respect.

To introduce these painters’ works I want to explore the inherent conflicts that hinder the acceptance of the genre contemporary landscape painting within an established contemporary art world. I also want to concentrate on the term ‘Plein-Air’, defined as working ‘in the open air’, and representing the central theme of this exhibition.

The uniqueness of the Plein-Air painting is its reliance on direct perception.  In the simplest sense, there is no place for the literary intellect that plays such an important role in much contemporary art today.  The image has to exist on an emotional level if it is to hold any meaning at all. (I would suggest that all great painting must have this emotional depth.)  Plein-Air work must rely solely on the integrity of the paint surface to convey meaning.  Without the literary level of interpretation, purely representational work is often demoted to the level of craft.  Often contemporary Plein-Air painting can describe a type of painting that is a purely technical exercise, an act of mimicry. The painting becomes less than a topographical record.

As a counterpoint to this, it can equally be said that much contemporary modern art has been reduced to an imposed meaning - the picture’s only reason for being is the framework of belief that is created through critical interpretation.  The common misconception is that the analysis and commentary of the picture is the justification for the work. This creates a barrier to the act of looking.  The translation of the image into written language becomes more important than a simple interpretation of the picture surface.

The 19th Century Plein-Air movement created a unique point in the history of painting: a revelation of meaning and aesthetic depth without reliance on anything but the picture surface and translation of the landscape in front of the artist, a point of conscious deliberation that gave new impetus to the painted mark as gestural expression.  The prescribed meanings and structures of the institutional art academies were thrown off, and the capacity of the image to express emotional depth was restored. Over the next century, from this starting point, experimentation and the need to break down older structures of meaning extended boundary lines in terms of the way we understand painting.  There were created rich new techniques and possibilities for using paint that could only have evolved with an understanding of the purely abstract forms of painting developed through this conscious act of looking.

Unfortunately, this very process of understanding conjured the literary imagination and started to bury that initial potential beneath a new literary web of imposed meaning.

Contemporary painting can be prescriptive and rely on a very developed art community structure for success or failure, so once again we can see a new academia reigning over the way we perceive art. There is a need for reappraisal within contemporary art and a re-evaluation of traditional realism is long overdue.  The full paced flight of the 19th century Modernist artist from all that was academic and traditional is now a redundant concept. Purely perceptual painting is now placed outside of the newly formed art academy structures and is the low art counterpoint to the glorious and triumphant modernist experiment. (A fact also reminiscent of the place Alla-Prima painting occupied when compared to its High Art counterparts on the walls of the fashionable 19th Century French salon).

Plein-Air painting is in a similar position to its historical starting point, but now, due to Modernism, the gestural mark is liberated from its links to realism and topography. Ironically, the landscape painter is also liberated from strictures of a traditional framework of meaning. The landscape painter has the potential to re-integrate the last century of experimentation into the landscape. The landscape can now be seen in its purist form of the abstract mark, perceived and invested with meaning.

Surely such a turn around would justify the imposition of a major full stop after the last hundred years of art history? One thing can be said, within all movements and ism’s, when painting comes from the heart, and taps into this fundamental emotional energy, something truly exciting and memorable happens. It can also be said that when a particular movement taps into this ground swell, all barriers of intellectual meaning are broken and the work becomes truly democratic and capable of appreciation on the highest to lowest levels of understanding. Witness the massive interest in Plein-Air painting at the hobby level, and the increasing publicity given to a lively and growing movement that is attracting more and more serious painters.

I have no wish to overlay these ideas onto the artists’ work in this show, but all these painters have worked over the years with a will to give us their particular vision of the world; often outside of that area of comfort where the excepted ism’s of the day are nurtured by the art market machine. In some ways all these painters have picked up the dialogue in the wake of a vacuum of meaning in our current generation. This has not happened in a preconceived fashion, but, it seems, again, like the hobbyist’s fascination with the landscape, a spontaneous outpouring of creativity.