Artist's Statement

Art can be an expression of desire. In the case of landscape painting it's the soul's desire to escape the daily entrapments of the mind's concerns. The landscape is a metaphor for the soul's going forth. Emerson wrote eloquently of the liberation he found in the woods in his essay "Nature," (opens a new window) whence comes the quote on the homepage of my website. This element of spiritual liberation as expressed by the Transcendentalists of the mid 1800s was a strong influence on the American landscape painters of that era--the Luminists and the Hudson River School--and continues to influence contemporary American landscape painting, even while we redefine humanity's relation to the natural world we inhabit.

Through art we attempt to possess, to inhabit, to identify withor become one with a thing or a place. The ancient cave painters painted what was important to them, the animals that provided their sustenance. In the same way, landscape painting can reflect a spiritual hunger.

A couple of years ago we were on an excursion in western Michigan, driving around in the woods at sundown. We were cruising a back road which paralleled Lake Michigan looking for a likely turn-off to the lake, which we found before too long. The road finally ended at a small parking lot for a local park. Stairs went up the landward side of a giant sand dune. Giant dunes are a common feature of Great Lakes coastlines. The stairs went up and up. Out of breath, we reached the top of the dune and gazed out over the great lake. The sun had just set, and soft gray and yellow clouds covered most of the vast sky and played their colors on the almost-still lake spread out before us in three directions. We fell silent for a while, and when we finally spoke we said, "This is amazing," "This is incredible." We really didn't have the words for it. It was one of those moments when natural beauty just overtakes you. It was a "transparent eyeball" moment.

It's not a matter of painting the place as it is; I try to paint the feeling of being in that place. I use the landscape as a way to try to paint the feeling of being.

For me, the process or act of creating should have at its core a contemplative, spiritual understanding of the landscape, which is to say nature. The act of creating is an act of learning. Unfortunately these ideal conditions don't always hold, and much of the process gets bound up in capturing certain fleeting moments with a camera, much as a hunter on safari would go after the next antelope or elephant.

I live in the Detroit area, a gritty urban hub of America's industrial rust belt. In light of that one could say painting pastoral landscapes is escapist, and I wouldn't argue. Lately, though, I've become interested in urban landscapes, factories, refineries, railroad tracks, trucks and dumpsters and oil barrels. These things can evoke feelings too. Buildings, city streets, bridges, these are things that show up in my dreams. I'm not as certain about the feelings such places arouse as I am with the coasts, for example. Painting these pictures becomes an examination of those feelings.

This work doesn't attempt to be ambitious art, in the art-historical sense. Look elsewhere for PoMo Irony. Mine is not an art of strategy, of épater le bourgoisie. What I have to say functions more as an emotional response to my surroundings.

I want to do at least a few canvases in my lifetime which will be an emotional kick in the chest.

---Arthur Chartow

 

• When I visited the Uffizi Gallery in Florence a few years back it was wonderful to see in person the Botticellis, Pieros, and Michelangelos, but I spent the most time in front of The Portinari Triptych of Hugo van der Goes. The individual humanity of the figures in this scene of Christ and the Virgin in the manger was overwhelmingHugo, as it happens, was instrumental in bringing the new invention, oil painting, to Italy.
• Bruegel. No one has ever quite said more about the human condition in the way he placed man in the landscape. He takes man as he is, at his saintly best or murderous worst, and places his comedies and tragedies in the midst of a sublime landscape that transcends human cares. His landscapes make us understand the preciousness of human existence by showing us how insignificant we are.
• Vermeer, Turner, Claude.
• The swirling apocalyptic visions of John Martin.
• The permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where I spent many hours in my youth. I was frightened and fascinated by the Surrealists Yves Tanguy, Paul Delvaux, Giorgio DiChirico and Salvador Dali and by works by Peter Blume and George Tooker.
• Lucian Freud. Strongest painter of the human figure working today.
• American landscape painters have a unique heritage, and a unique attitude toward the landscape. To name but a few: Thomas Cole, Martin Johnson Heade, Frederick Church, Albert Bierstadt, Winslow Homer, Fairfield Porter, Neil Welliver. I realize this is a wide range of tastes and attitudes, from the moralizing of Cole to the theatricality of Bierstadt and Church, to the cool modernism of Welliver. Landscape is a big deal for Americans. I've seen the American landscape called "unpaintably stupendous." Maybe it is, maybe that's why we keep trying.
• R. Crumb's comix had an effect on me early on, and I admire his hard stance against the commodification of culture. Check out the movie "Crumb."
• Kafka, Borges, Stanislaw Lem, Vonnegut, Mark Helprin, Garcia Marquez, Hemingway, Jim Harrison, Chekhov, Emerson, Thoreau.
• Mahler.
• Ukiyo-e.
• In my youth I spent many hours in the American Museum of Natural History. I would wander the halls of the mammals of North America, (opens a new window) Asia, and Africa, and stand before the wonderful giant dioramas and make up stories in my head of what it would be like to be there, on a hillside in India or a river in Africa. The painted walls wrap around and above, and blend into the floor of the display, where painted casts of actual flora join with animal models (presumably stuffed) to create an uncanny realism. These dioramas had a huge influence on my sense of pictorial space.
• Alexis Rockman paints scenes of eco-disaster by fusing scientific naturalist painting with the nightmare visions of Hieronymus Bosch.
• Craig McPherson's amazing mezzotints
• Galen Rowell's photography. More than anyone else I can think of he embodies the principle of going out and getting, of being willing to do whatever it takes to get the image. My own work is most successful as a result of doing just a small bit of what Galen did. He will be missed.
• On a recent trip to Russia I discovered a number of fine landscape painters little-known outside of Russia, the most amazing of whom is Kuindji. A master of using color to express the emotional qualities of light in the landscape. Also loved Shishkin.

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