by ALICIA CRAIG FAZON
Art New England, June/July 1994
One of the questions artists in the 1990's have to address is, how can an artist represent the natural
world in a relevant idiom? We are heirs of a post-cubist, post-representaional era of abstract art in
which an illusionistic transcription of a bucolic landscape no longer seems possible. In the late
twentieth century artists use computers to sketch, rather than traditional pen, pencil, or charcoal
and paper. Machines create art: photographs act as substitutes for paintings; nature itself is polluted
by industrial waste, atomic rain, and developers' designs.
Many of these conditions prevailed in the late nineteenth century when artists used the landscape to
express ideas of majesty, sublimity, man's dominion over nature, the inspiration of the poet, even
the allegory of human life. But in the twentieth century the language of abstract art dominates and
the realistic landscape as an avant-guaarde or even current mode of expression no longer seems
viable.
Or does it? Recent exhibitions of five artists in the Boston area using nature in significant and original
ways suggest that the theme of the landscape and the material of the natural world is still vital....
Prilla Smith Brackett's Marking a Year was the latest in the DeCordova Museum's New Work/New
England series. Beginning on the vernal equinox, or first day of spring, 1991, the Cambridge artist
made a drawing for each day of the year based on some aspect of nature. Local trees, vegetables,
plants and flowers, and also the lush tropical foliage from two trips taken during the year to a jungle
research station in Costa Rica and an Earthwartch camp in Madagascar found their way in. Although
these drawings at first appeared to be straight, visual transcriptions of the scene or object in front of
the artist, there were elements common to all: and interest in the lyric power of line, a fascination
with the process of growth, and often an expressive rendering of form. From the weeping beeches of
Mount auburn Cemetery to the jungle vines of Costa Rica, tree, plant, flower, and vegetable forms
seemed to take on a life of their own, to burgeon and uncoil sinuously. One was reminded of
Cézanne's definition of art: "Painting from nature is not copying the objective, it is realizing one's
sensations....."
In all these works nature is a component part, but so is the transforming vision of the artist that
includes the important ingredient of the artist's nature as well as the artist's vision. In perhaps an
apocryphal story, Hans Hofmann supposedly said the Jackson Pollock, "You will repeat yourself if you
do not create from nature." Pollock replied, "I am nature." They were both right.
©Alicia Craig Faxon 1994