Perspective
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| A BRIEF PERSPECTIVE ON AMERICAN LANDSCAPE PAINTING AND THE PAINTINGS OF DANIEL CHARD The Hudson River School was the first major school of landscape painting in America, the landscape symbolizing a unique New World landscape, with seemingly infinite resources and expansive space. In the mid-19th century, the Hudson River School presented paintings that reflected the simplicity and innocence of the American experience in that landscape, the paintings being innocent, direct and descriptive, while sympathetic and warm. These works were relatively unaffected by European painting traditions. Leaping forward, this pure descriptive quality reappeared in the late 1960s as realism was reestablished in America. Among a range of approaches to representation, Photorealism presented a painting approach that emphasized purely descriptive and visual qualities, absent the slightest psychological connection between the viewer and the painting’s content. Photorealist paintings represented a cool temperament rather than a warm temperament, through which the viewer may relate to the painting content on an emotional level. The Hudson River School and Photorealism represents a stylistic gamut from innocence and idealism to purely descriptive and detached imagery, absent ideological agenda. These approaches to imagery, though disparate, represent important aspects of the landscape painting of Daniel Chard. Chard’s landscape paintings, after thirty years of development, include important features of the Hudson River School and Photorealism–potentially opposite styles– while embracing a contemporary vision. Moreover, the work has evolved from a kind of personal innocence and a limited aesthetic agenda to its present state: work incorporating tempered emotion, using the familiar and symbolic landscape idiom to address experience in nature and consciousness itself–that timeless moment, when the person and the landscape connect, and are one. Chard’s paintings reach beyond the obvious and apparent, the form residing just beyond the physical painting–as phenomena. Chard’s landscape paintings, after thirty years of development, include important features of the Hudson River School and Photorealism–potentially opposite styles– while embracing a contemporary vision. Moreover, the work has evolved from a kind of personal innocence and a limited aesthetic agenda to its present state: work incorporating tempered emotion, using the familiar and symbolic landscape idiom to address experience in nature and consciousness itself–that timeless moment, when the person and the landscape connect, and are one. Chard’s paintings reach beyond the obvious and apparent, the form residing just beyond the physical painting–as phenomena. Paintings are mental constructs with little potential to actually represent the infinite and unbounded natural landscape, not just because the landscape extends beyond the horizon and contains infinite vantage points and thus infinite horizons, but because its existence, inseparable from our existence, can only be accounted for with mathematics, not perception. The thought of “capturing” the landscape in a painting or somehow painting in the “out-of-doors” to capture the landscape may result in small and limited paintings. In Chard’s landscapes, the imagery is a vehicle where analogies and facsimiles combined with spatial energy leverage aspects of our experience, to give form to the unexpressed. Initially, the images are developed on the computer, establishing a plausible place in photographic form, a reference image, from which the painting image may be evolved. Given a plausible and visually interesting place, the image is begun on canvas, laid out in painting space with consideration for the picture plane and illusionistic space. At this point many aspects of the image evolve automatically–unconsciously–particularly the dynamics of the painting space. Though the paintings appear realistic, they aren’t realistic. Rather, the representational descriptions are somewhat apart from purely analogical imagery. This disparity between the painting’s “realism” and the viewer’s expectation of a realistic landscape produces subtle tension, adding to the expressive content. Chard’s paintings are developed over time–weeks–the image manipulated to the very end. One of the challenges for Chard is to keep the painting alive throughout the process, reorganizing and redefining. So the painter brings multiple vantage points–over time–to act on a single painting, allowing the expressive dimension of the painting to be expanded and articulated toward a final form. As the painting image is honed, the space is constantly renegotiated, with large changes possible to the very end. Central to the phenomena in Chard’s work is the acrylic technique and the use of color. The paint is applied with very thin transparent strokes, gradually building up the tone and the color. The paintings are created in intense light and require strong lighting to actually see the range of tone and color. The layers of transparent strokes produce an active surface quality that suggests the infinite complexity of the natural environment. As each painting may be considered as containing many “windows” into the landscape, each of these areas has the potential to stand-alone for its pictorial space and visual entertainment. |