the holy trinity of santa fe landscape painting: john fincher, woody gwyn and forrest moses

THE HOLY TRINITY OF SANTA FE LANDSCAPE PAINTING:

JOHN FINCHER, WOODY GWYN & FORREST MOSES

JULY 19 - SEPTEMBER 1. 2013

Railyard: 1613 Paseo De Peralta | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | tel 505.988.3250 www.lewallengalleries.com | info@lewallengalleries.com

cover: Monzano, 2013, egg tempera on canvas, 44” x 44”

The Holy Trinity of Santa Fe Landscape Painting:JOHN FINCHER, WOODY GWYN & FORREST MOSES

The Holy Trinity of Santa Fe Landscape Painting:JOHN FINCHER, WOODY GWYN & FORREST MOSES

July 19 - September 1. 2013The appellation of “holy trinity” to describe John Fincher, Woody Gwyn and Forrest Moses was coined by art writer and former museum executive John O’Hern in a 2011 article for the magazine. He cel-ebrated these three major figures of American landscape painting for their differing visual interpreta-tions of the beauty of the world surrounding them. Although the term “holy trinity” is tongue-in-cheek hyperbole—and more sacerdotal than art critical—there is fitting pertinence here in a major exhibition of new work by each in its application to the extraordinary talent of these three venerated painters.

Each in his particular manner redefines ways of looking at the landscape, its protean vistas and em-blematic details. Although painting style and subject matter vary enormously among the three, there is a remarkable consistency in the intensity of engagement and fascination from the visual encounter with the work of each. With distinctive techniques and points of view about how to express his own experience of place, each artist excels in connecting image and cognition to prime the emotions. The result is the widely-held respect underlying the apt if slightly apocryphal anointment of these three as a kind of “holy trinity.”

The pictorial strategy of each artist is quite different from what has in past times defined the ideal of landscape painting. All three privilege creative imagination over verisimilitude. Even in the precise real-ism of Gwyn’s detailed vistas, his canny use of unconventional perspective, ingenious light and unex-pected relationships between compositional elements, elevates humble settings to breathtaking experi-ences. Moses’ deft, often reductive series of brushstrokes and color tracts powerfully ignite memory and emotion as deep and intense as his own feelings for the woods, ponds and streams that inspire him. Fincher has the eye of a sage, seeing in small details of Western landscape—as unassuming as cactus spines and poplar trees—the timeless and enduring strength, integrity and rustic beauty that have come to signify a powerful aspect of the American character.

All three of these remarkable artists are at the pinnacle of their painting careers. Together they rep-resent some of the finest innovative visual conceptions in the long history of landscape painting. The “Holy Trinity” celebrates the unique contribution by each to this genre and the enlivening energy their work resonates in combination.

The art of John Fincher distills the vastness of the American West into compositions of un-assuming components that celebrate the land of opportunity and individual spirit. He plucks details of the West and infuses them with such vivacity of color and form that they become nearly iconic in their capacity to evince mythic meaning that subtly references the transfor-mation of the Wild Frontier into the symbol of the American character. Fincher’s paintings are snapshots—can-dids, magnifications, celebrations—of the cac-tus, trees, fences, and other fragments that make up the complex beauty of the American West. Fincher’s genius—his nuanced sense for contrasting color and interplay between small and large, mundane and mythic—im-bues his canvases with a sense of delight and reverence. There is an authorial integrity, both in his paring down of a majestic landscape to common details and in his audacious use of electric color and vivid shadowing, that im-parts a sense of the energy and optimism as-

sociated with the land he paints. The essential component of Fincher’s work, pointing out, for example, the beauty in the smallest detail of a pine branch against the gradient of a sunset, is achieved through a singular blend of sensu-ality and observation. The result is to inspire grace from the commonplace. Fincher’s work derives startling emotional resonance from a combination of rigorously balanced composition, nuanced brushwork, dramatic shadowing, and the application of intense points of contrasting colors to punctu-ate significant visual elements. Ultimately, his work explores diverse art historical and per-sonal references to offer new understandings of America’s natural and cultural landscape. His images subtly unravel the manifold mean-ings inscribed within representations of the American West.

masterful painting skills that have made him one of the most acclaimed realist painters of the American landscape. Use of unusual perspective and dramatic angles, an ability to render the ordinary as heroic, color that is as lushly romantic as it is grippingly real, baffling capacities to capture light that alternates be-tween the crystalline and the veiled, produce at the brush of Woody Gwyn pictures that are superlative in their verisimilitude and compel-ling in their transcendent power to succinctly communicate the essence of things. These diverse skills are mainly applied in Gwyn’s work to presenting unalloyed snippets from the places he observes. By attending as much to the most prosaic detail of a scene as he does its majestic grandeur, Gwyn paints a piece of roadside gravel as though it were a piece of sacred sculpture and renders rust on guardrails with the same reverence da Vinci felt for the sleeve folds of the “Mona Lisa.” This respect for the smallest detail—even in the presence of breathtaking vistas—distin-guishes Gwyn’s from other perspectives on landscape. And in his sense of parity between the majestic and the mundane lies a large measure of the artist’s genius to bring about

With a direct honesty—the goal of “painting things the way they are”—Woody Gwyn’s humility belies the complex techniques and

fluctuations in the viewer’s sense of reality, subtle turns in perception that shift the mind and move the heart. The visual journey that is a Gwyn painting opens the eyes to new ways of seeing and inspires enhanced depths of feeling about space, the land and the defini-tion of beauty. Gwyn, like van Gogh, refuses to stop work-ing on a painting—adding, subtracting, work-ing and reworking, constantly refining—as though this unremitting dedication to getting it all just right is required to achieve the sense of transcendence and essence that Gwyn can-didly states as his aim as an artist. Gwyn is a virtuoso at bringing out an epic re-alism of the American landscape, but his chal-lenge to extract the beauty from the guardrail, stop sign or the everyday object attests to Gw-yn’s mastery of painting. The viewer is capti-vated by the poetic affinity to make a subtle comparison between the natural and the man-made. His conception of the beautiful leaves no doubt that a mountain or ocean can be in aesthetic union with a guardrail or highway. At his hand, the ordinary suddenly is significant and the current becomes timeless.

Forrest Moses Virginia Reflection, 2013, oil on canvas, 42” x 60”

Moses is one of the most renowned painters working today, creating abstracted renditions of landscape that evoke more than depict. Through a reductive sense of the essential and a subtle but intense power of expression, Moses liberates the imagination and opens the possibility for contemplation of the sub-lime. His paintings and monotypes inspire po-etic—even potentially transcendent—visual experience for the viewer and enable medi-tative associations of image with memory of being in nature. Through his expression of a unique and syn-ergistic union between mind, heart and hand, Moses produces an art of intimation rather than disclosure, where seasons are sug-gested by subtle color harmonies, expertly balanced compositions include no more than is necessary in the service of evocation, and a uniquely refined and fluid elegance informs each and every brushstroke. To Moses, perfection is an illusion more ap-propriately replaced by authenticity of experi-ence. By endeavoring to allow the authentic to become present in his work, Moses acquires clarity of vision that occurs best when the art-

ist relinquishes control to happenstance. Mo-ses has mastered an essential freedom from detail without ignoring it. Distilling harmony from the thundering chaos of the universe, his paintings transport the viewer beyond mere description of a landscape and into an almost transcendental experience of the place itself. He seeks, in his own words, “to discover na-ture’s truth and give life to a painted image by understanding the rhythms and pulses behind appearances.” As such, his works stress brev-ity and simplicity to magnify the intensity of his expressions—underscoring the importance of negative space or nothingness as juxtaposi-tion to objects of nature that already occupy the world. Now in his eightieth year, Moses commu-nicates in his work a vivid sense of essence in favor of excess, a reflection of the depth of his personal allegiance to subtle elegance that blends simplicity with the complex. In striking this zen-like harmony, his paintings and monotypes exude exhilarated spontane-ity and improvisation anchored by underlying and enduring calm.

The paintings of these three remarkable visual interlocutors of the modern landscape com-bine in the “Holy Trinity” to offer a rare oppor-tunity to compare and contrast powerful ways of considering the world’s tableaus, vistas and details. One cannot help but be moved by the sincerity and honesty that pervades the vision of each of these extraordinary artists as they approach the land. Though the expressive conventions employed by each differ greatly, the emotional valence each brings to his paintings place them in a similar orbit. Each engages the land as a sacred place and con-secrates his painting of it to the greater good of beauty and its singular capacity to deliver the viewer—even if only for a moment—from the hollow paucities of everyday life. These paintings uplift with awe and gratitude, they charm and entrance. They quiet the heart and enliven the imagination. In making their art, Moses, Gwyn and Fincher unite in pursuing within painting their own sense of ineffability that truly is the divine.

JOHN FINCHER

9John Fincher Guardian, 2013,

oil on linen, 70” x 32”

10John Fincher Cascade Pines, 2013,oil on linen, 70” x 32”

11John Fincher Spring Rain, 2013,

oil on linen, 70” x 32”

12John Fincher Tumbler, 2013,oil on linen, 48” x 24”

13John Fincher Homage to William Morris, 2013,

oil on linen, 48” x 22”

14John Fincher Clear Mountain Pine, 2013,oil on linen, 24” x 36”

15John Fincher Deep Autumn, 2013,

oil on linen, 24” x 36”

16John Fincher Red Clay, 2013,oil on linen, 28” x 30”

John Fincher Into the Woods, 2013,oil on linen, 40” x 58”17

18John Fincher Climber: Cinco de Mayo, 2013,oil on linen, 40” x 58”

John Fincher October Yellow, 2010,oil on panel, 7” x 5”19

20John Fincher October Blue, 2010,oil on panel, 7” x 5”

21John Fincher October Red #4, 2010,

oil on panel, 7” x 5”

WOODY GWYN

23Woody Gwyn Monzano, 2013,

egg tempera on canvas, 44” x 44”

24Woody Gwyn Thames, 2011-2013,egg tempera on canvas, 60” x 70”

25Woody Gwyn New Spring Road (Lambeth),

2013, egg tempera on canvas, 72” x 72”

26Woody Gwyn Ocean Fog, 2013,oil on canvas, 86” x 60”

Woody Gwyn Big Sur, 2008-2009,oil on panel, 12” x 37”27

28Woody Gwyn Quarry, 2010-2013,oil on canvas, 48” x 48”

29Woody Gwyn Lagunita, 2009-2013,

oil on canvas, 30” x 30”

30Woody Gwyn Sea Fog, 2013,oil on canvas, 16.75” x 12.75”

31Woody Gwyn Wave Fog, 2013,

oil on panel, 18” x 24”

Woody Gwyn Oak/Hampstead Heath, 2012-2013, egg tempera on panel, 3.75” x 2”

Woody Gwyn Ocean/Hawaii, 2013,oil on panel, 2.5” x 3.5”

32

33Woody Gwyn Monterey, 2008-2009,oil on linen, 24” x 12”

Woody Gwyn Espana, 2012,egg tempera on panel, 12” x 12”

34

Woody Gwyn Pond/Hampstead Heath, 2012- 2013, egg tempera on panel, 4” x 4”

Woody Gwyn Grove/Hampstead Heath, 2012-2013, egg tempera on panel, 2.75” x 4.25”

Woody Gwyn Cotswold Curve, 2012-2013,egg tempera on panel, 2” x 8”

FORREST MOSES

36Forrest Moses Tesuque Stream, 2013,oil on canvas, 48” x 96”

37Forrest Moses Virginia Reflection, 2013,

oil on canvas, 42” x 60”

38Forrest Moses Mountain Water II, 2013,oil on canvas, 78” x 48”

39Forrest Moses Water Detail, 2013,

oil on canvas, 50” x 52”

40Forrest Moses October Reflections, 2008,oil on canvas, 50” x 52”

41Forrest Moses Lowland Woods, 2013,

oil on canvas, 50” x 52”

42Forrest Moses Woods with Pond, 2013,oil on canvas, 50” x 52”

43Forrest Moses M 13/03, 2013,

monotype, 30” x 22”

44Forrest Moses M 13/05, 2013,monotype, 30” x 22”

45Forrest Moses M 13/06, 2013,

monotype, 30” x 22”

46Forrest Moses M 13/10, 2013,monotype, 30” x 22”

47Forrest Moses M 13/14, 2013,

monotype, 30” x 22”

48Forrest Moses M 13/15, 2013,monotype, 30” x 22”

49Forrest Moses M 13/18, 2013,

monotype, 29” x 41”

50Forrest Moses M 13/24, 2013,monotype, 41” x 29”

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

Forrest Moses Quiet Water, 2012, oil on canvas, 48” x 50”