Near to Here - By John Mendelsohn - Summer 2006

The current paintings are part of a direction that began in 2003. The work since then has focused on the rural environment, both visually and emotionally. While concentrating on observable reality, there is a strong psychological undertone to these paintings, reflecting human and social concerns that grow from and then extend beyond their immediate setting.

The artist is based in northeast Wisconsin, an area whose rural character is challenged by tourism, the appearance of second homes, and other incursions of contemporary culture. The paintings reflect both the persistence of traditional agriculture, hunting, and fishing, and the anxiety of change. Below that shift lies the artist's feeling for the land, and for the complex relationship of its human inhabitants with nature. There is a strong feeling for nature's beauty, for the skies, the fields, and especially the animals. At the same time, the work implies a stark ambivalence: nature is the source of material bounty for the farmer or hunter, but also potentially is an unforgiving force that can destroy as easily as it gives.

The painting Whitetail, with a deer in the middle of its three panels, embodies this sense of a human being as a predator and also as a vulnerable fellow creature. The multi-panel paintings allow the artist to present disparate aspects of an experience that is irreducible to a single image. Like a film with disjunctive edits, these paintings ask the viewer to fill in the gaps and begin to create a connected narrative.

The artist's closeness to his environment is expressed in his appreciation of its specific light and color, conveyed through a direct realism energized by painterly abstraction. Animals are depicted with the familiarity of intimate portraits. People, while rendered with equal fidelity, reflect the painter's interest in "felt myths", a sense that he is a witness to archetypal characters and a way of life that is disappearing before his eyes. The melancholic undertow beneath the bucolic setting pulls the viewer into a human drama of mortality and impermanence that transcends any one time or place.