ronnie landfield: after the rain

Ronnie Landfield A F T E R T H E R A I N

Across the Plains, 2012, acrylic on canvas, 64” x 72”

SEPTEMBER 6 - OCTOBER 13. 2013

Railyard: 1613 Paseo De Peralta Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 tel 505.988.3250 Downtown: 125 West Palace Avenue Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 tel 505.988.8997

www.lewallengalleries.com | info@lewallengalleries.com

cover: In the Smoke, 1985, acrylic on canvas, 40” x 37”

RonnieLandfieldAFTER THE RAIN

After the Rain commemorates the personal and professional ordeal

survived by the artist in the wake of the devastation and destruction of

Hurricane Sandy that struck New York with such calamitous force on

October 29, 2012. The old building on Desbrosses Street, one block

away from the Hudson River in downtown Manhattan, that had served

since 1969 as Landfield’s home and studio was flooded within minutes.

Scores of works by the artist whose paintings, prints and drawings are

installed in more than 40 museums and public collections, were engulfed

in three feet of water: a surging, uncontainable threat to a half-century’s

span of extraordinary artistic production. Trapped by the rising waters

and helpless to try and rescue his work, the artist and his wife waited for

the 1,000-mile-wide monster to subside.

In its aftermath Landfield, like many other New Yorkers, has endured a

modern-day ordeal full of gargantuan effort, deprivation, despair and even a

legal battle to fight an attempt to use against him the adversity of a hurricane

as premise for eviction from his rent-controlled home and studio of 44 years.

Happily, however, countless hours of uncertain labor have been rewarded

by the successful rescue of a lifetime of art. The artist, his wife and sons

have retrieved monumental paintings from the edge of muck and mold,

paper work and canvases have been meticulously treated with alcohol

and disinfectant, alternative storage has been searched for and found,

endless caches of art and archives have been shuttled to drier places.

The zeal and unrelenting sacrifice made by the artist to see his art

endure has been nothing short of heroic. “I just hope that all the work

in my studio survives this monstrosity,” Landfied said shortly after the

storm had passed. This hope has sustained him, and through it all he

and his art have indeed survived. Perhaps Landfield’s words in 2001

were both prophetic and prescriptive: “As an artist the faith required to

make visible and to express the inexpressible prepares you to accept

the unacceptable and embrace the unknown.” The artist has not only

embraced his lot of having weathered the unacceptable, but at the end

of the day he smiles and says, “In a way we’re all lucky.”

The artist is now in the fifth decade of his career as an American master

of Lyrical and Post-Painterly Abstraction. He has helped to define the

evolution and continuing legacy of abstraction in the 20th century.

Finding inspiration in sources such as Sung Dynasty Chinese landscape

painting, Landfield utilizes large fields of flat color spread across or

stained into the canvas, creating lavish surfaces. As he employs subtle

gradients of hue, canvas scale, and intensity, color is then released

from objective context and becomes the subject itself. Loose broad

landscapes of paint application and arcs of joyous color create poetic

scenes to captivate the viewer. The artist himself would not describe his

works as necessarily landscapes, however. Often he will utilize a bold

band of high-keyed color at the bottom or side of a painting to indicate

that the work is not a recognizable scene—a balancing act of intuitive

brushwork and a subjective groundedness. Landfield says of his own

work, “Spirituality and feeling are the basic subjects of my work. They

are depictions of intuitive expressions using color as language, and the

landscape as a metaphor for the arena of life.…I sense a visual music

that externalizes what I feel within me and in the air.”

Ronnie Landfield: AFTER THE RAIN

3Threshold of Eternity, 2011,

acrylic on canvas, 91.5” x 76”

4To the North, 2011,acrylic on canvas, 70” x 54.5”

5

Vermont Memory, 2012, acrylic on canvas, 67” x 36”

6The Orchard, 1977,acrylic on canvas, 63.25” x 40.5”

7Woman Diptych, 2012,

acrylic on canvas, 15.75” x 31”

8Light on the Mountain, 2008,acrylic on canvas, 24” x 24”

9Force of October, 2008,

acrylic on canvas, 40.25” x 18.25”

10Iridiris, 1999,acrylic on canvas, 18.75” x 14.25”

11 Tennessee Flame, 1999,

acrylic on canvas, 22” x 18.5”

12The Harvest, 2006,acrylic on canvas, 77” x 67”

13Coral Wall, 2010,

acrylic on canvas, 43.25” x 52”

14Shifting Winds, 2012, acrylic on canvas, 69.5” x 74”

15Early Horizon, 2012,

acrylic on canvas, 35” x 51”

16The Wind and the Rain, 2012, acrylic on canvas, 83.25” x 75”

17Down Approach, 2012,

acrylic on canvas, 84” x 80.5”

18Seasons of Change, 1985, acrylic on canvas, 59.75” x 37.5”

19Awakened Memory, 2012,

acrylic on canvas, 22.75” x 58.5”

20From Woodstock to Truro, 2011, acrylic on canvas, 74” x 62”

21Light of Day, 2012,

acrylic on canvas, 44” x 91”

22Leonore #4, 1979-1981, acrylic on canvas, 80” x 50”

23Morning Measure, 2012,

acrylic on canvas, 34” x 28”

24Concentric Episode Series, 2012 acrylic on canvas, 12” x 14”

25Colorado, 2003,

acrylic on canvas, 30” x 55”

Railyard: 1613 Paseo De Peralta Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 tel 505.988.3250 Downtown: 125 West Palace Avenue Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 tel 505.988.8997

www.lewallengalleries.com | info@lewallengalleries.com