CATALOG ESSAYS

SIX PRAIRIE VOICES, by Laurence Lieberman

SIX PRAIRIE ARTISTS
David Sokol

There is a tendency to think of landscape painting reflecting untouched nature rather than as exterior settings showing the effects of human intervention. However, the earliest pieces that could justify the name landscape - at least in the Western tradition - were Roman paintings of the gardens and cultivated areas that were part of illusionistic wall paintings. Mountain ranges, forests, and bodies of water appear in illuminated manuscripts and wall paintings over the next fifteen hundred years, but most scenes were of a settled and ordered world. Paintings of a nature untouched by human hands appeared in the seventeenth century in Europe, though specific religious connotations were part of the interpretation of the subjects. Dutch seventeenth century landscapes were of both types, with painters presenting scenes of wild nature and the local domesticated fields stretching from outside the villager's back door to a distant horizon.

In the early nineteenth century United States, Charles Willson Peale and his immediate Philadelphia followers favored the British landscape tradition of domesticated landscapes, but making them even more local, specific, and documentary. Incorporating the naturalist concerns of William Bartram, the specificity of the enlightenment world view of Peale's great friend Jefferson, and a preference for the picturesque over the sublime, a native landscape school was born. It is this domestic landscape tradition, rather than the more dramatic painting of Thomas Cole and the New York based Hudson River School, that is the spiritual and even stylistic grandparent of the landscapes of the Illinois artists represented in this exhibition.

As the West was opened to exploration and settlement after the Civil War, Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran, and other American painters created giant canvases of the great vistas and dramatic settings of the Rockies and the Grand Canyon; Frederic Church and Martin J. Heade painted even more exotic and remote subjects of the tropics and mountains of Ecuador and Peru. And while the successive influences of the French Barbizon and Impressionist painters reintroduced the local and even the intimate scene at the end of the nineteenth century, specificity and the importance of region and place were lacking.

The rise of Midwest Regionalism created a revival of interest in both small towns and the American farm, with John S. Curry and Thomas Hart Benton reemphasizing the horizontality of the prairie. However, the prominence of the artists' social criticism and their historical references thrust the domesticated landscape into a supporting role, rather than presenting it as the subject of the painting itself. Thus, while the Regionalists were important predecessors, the specificity of the local setting was more readily found in the New England work of Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper. Other more abstract painters of the 1930s and 40s - Fairfield Porter, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Marsden Hartley - were equally committed to the evocation of a particular region and setting.

The six painters in this exhibition are all residents of Illinois, and all take the local landscape as the sole - or, at least, primary - subject of their art. Three, Atkinson, Coulter, and Dubina were born in Illinois, and their mature art has reflected the inspiration of their native place; Gregor and Winn were raised in the Midwest and Jones relocated here from Wales, but all three became involved with the depiction of the local landscape soon after settling in the state. Their work is situated at various points along a continuity from descriptive realism to abstraction, and also varies in size from modest to very large. Some work in one material and others either present similar ideas in different media or divide their work and imagery by medium. They produce oils, pastels, acrylics, watercolors, and prints created by diverse processes; they also vary in their perceptions of the landscape. While some stress the permanent, the timelessness of the scenes, others concentrate on the momentary, the elusive, the change of weather that dramatically and drastically impacts on the scene. Although many exhibitions have brought two or more of these artists together in recent years, none of them feels part of a particular school of landscape artists.

Harold Gregor is the person who has directly or indirectly influenced most of the artists in this group. Turning to a photo-based realism form of depiction of the farms and fields of Central Illinois soon after moving to Bloomington in 1970, he began to paint the large, specific, but generally unpeopled farm pieces that both created his reputation and brought students to Illinois State University to study with him. Ann Coulter, Michael Dubina, and James Winn have all been his students for a period of time, though their own work differs both from his and from one another. George Atkinson was born in Springfield but was educated as an artist in San Francisco, and Fred Jones was born and educated in Wales, yet fell in love with the ever-changing landscape of Central Illinois soon after arriving there in the late 1960s.

Gregor and Jones are the most adventurous in terms of the variety of media in which they work, and especially in the way they each make limited edition graphics that replicates some of their styles of painted work. Gregor's recent work denies both the deep perspectival background and meticulous detail that made him famous and brings us in close to the piece of landscape being represented. Coulter's work also substitutes a closer, less specific, and more abstract view of the nature she enjoys around her. Jones, though usually firmly anchoring his dramatic compositions in deep receding space, abstracts the sky itself and uses colors as far from tradition as the other two painters. His work strikes an unusual balance between clarity of composition and abstraction of color, while - in Gregor's current work - areas of color and form become one. Other crossovers of style, technique, and subject matter equally frustrate any effort at classification of the six artists.

While rooted more fully in traditional perspective than Gregor and Coulter are at this time in their careers, Jones, Dubina, and Winn are clearly much more in harmony with the nineteenth century Luminist painters and their conception of the "portrayal" of light. Though each of these three is interested in a moment in time, they are also using color and light in a metaphysical sense. Dubina's "Artist's Statement" defines his exploration as the contest between good and evil through the metaphor of light and dark; Winn's speaks of The Sublime, and notes that he uses color and value to convey the transcendent in and of nature; Jones defines his interest in the force of nature and uses the impressive changes in light to express the "power and majesty in visual terms." Each presents a different view of a nature anthropomorphized, more tied to the American Protestant tradition of Cole and Church in Winn, essentially pantheistic in the art of Jones, and most introspective and broodingly dualistic in the paintings of Dubina. Of the six artists whose work we study in this exhibition, it is these three who have been the most willing to describe their missions in writing, to define the sources and spirit behind their art. Perhaps, as they might be more fully described as working out religious beliefs in their landscape painting, it is probably not too surprising that they share the tendency to express their positions through the written word.

Yet, if we look at the work in terms of the actual subjects portrayed, it is Atkinson and Winn that are most closely related to Gregor's concern for the fields and the buildings that make up the Illinois farm. Their use of descriptive detail, their appreciation of the mundane, their sense of portraying a specific place and space, are unifying factors that contrast with differing uses of texture, color, and treatment of light and sky.

Though Gregor's use of color in his "flatscapes" and his most recent paintings and his different way of confronting both the land and the structures erected by the inhabitants of the farms are radically different from those of the other two artists, they share a similar commitment to their subject.

Still another interest that should be explored is the shape or form of the support on which the medium is placed. Coulter's occasional use of a diptych format and Dubina's presentation in the form of beveled edged canvases reflect their desire to focus the viewer's attention on the nature of their offerings in terms associated with high art of the past. Each is self-conscious of the access to the internal space, with Coulter speaking of being part of the landscape, a participant rather than a viewer, and Dubina utilizing the three dimensionality of the canvas to physically engage the viewer in the potential for entering his space.

A final comparison is the natural one relating to the use of materials and texture, and in that juxtaposition, the recent work by Gregor, the large pastels by Coulter, and the oils of Dubina come together. Coulter's handling of the medium, the way she exaggerates the freedom of the stroke, and her disinclination to smooth the surface of her compositions, all make the viewer aware of the artist's appreciation of the tactile elements of her work. Dubina employs what can only be described as a traditional "painterliness," the use of a thick and usually discernibly textured paint surface, while Gregor's recent acrylics and the "flatscapes" are alive with the fluttering and individually sensed brushstrokes, even when the surface is actually smooth.

As stated earlier, the thread that unites all of these Illinois artists is their commitment to the landscape, their belief that it is a most worthy subject. But there is more to it than that: they may not all talk about their preoccupation with the landscape, how it is their only subject, for all practical sakes, but the fact of the matter is that they are all fascinated by the potential of the subject. Though Gregor may look at many farms from the vantage point of an airplane and Coulter may go no further than her backyard, all six artists have discovered the comprehensive possibilities in their chosen subject matter. All find their local environment so rich in themes, color, and dramatic potential, that they have neither the need to seek their subjects in other settings nor convey the slightest boredom with the mixture of land, sky, and weather that is always available for them.

Changing seasons, showers, lightning, sunlight, and snow, all mediate the landscape, giving new form and experience to the most banal and mundane of farmlands, and the creativity and imagination of these artists invigorate their paintings and prints with strength and even passion. As stated at the outset, the earliest of American painters of nature were those interested in the specificity of the world around them, in the distinctions of plant forms, the effects of climate and weather, the passion for understanding local phenomena as clearly as did the natural scientists with whom they corresponded and shared samples. Now, at the end of the next century, in a different region of the country and utilizing both media and a scale of presentation unknown to their forerunners, these Illinois landscapists share much of their agenda and are the worthy inheritors of a distinctive American landscape tradition.

SIX PRAIRIE VOICES
Laurence Lieberman

The six authors, gathered here, are mated to their landscape in a rare communion. The bonds they have achieved with their setting, the Illinois prairie, is central to their lives and art. Moreover, these six poets comprise a lively and remarkably varied sheaf of voices, a rich multiplicity that bespeaks the many-sidedness of a landscape that is often mistakenly viewed as one-dimensional and forbidding, as in Richard Hugo's poem about the prairie:

With land this open, wind is blowing
slow miles home through grain,
knowing you'll arrive too late
to eat or find the lights on.
Flat and vast. Each farm beyond
a gunshot of the next. . .
. . . . . (from "Camas Prairie School")

In reading Forrest Robinson's "Western Illinois Country," we come to know how it is that those who inhabit hilly or mountainous terrains are deprived of many natural beauties:

No one growing up in hills can know
the origin of thunderclouds, the slow demise
of days in blinding, pink haze or clear azure,
fielding that single star we realize is meant for us. . .

Denizens of Colorado or Montana, like Hugo, cannot partake of the marvels that the Illinois prairie affords to the sensitive observer, one who has attuned himself to the more subtle and covert rewards of the land of great unbroken horizons. A panorama unfolds, here, that is unique and can hold its own against the most extrovert glamours of a mountain range or rocky seascape:

This is the land of the dropping sky
where stars sparkle flat out east and west,
north and south, where you ride at night
on top of the world....

Evidently, Robinson's favorite times of day are twilight and daybreak; at those marginal brief interludes, the first or last isolate stars may appear to hover, teasingly, just above the horizon. It's the "land of/the dropping sky" because the few starkly visible stars have--this moment--fallen to, or risen from, the horizon's edge. The sky may seem, at such haunted moments, to suddenly loom closer to our bare heads than ever before--so near, we feel that we "ride at night/ on top of the world." The pristine unobstructed view, "running forever" in all directions, seems to transform the flatlands the prairie, into a great upraised flat mesa. It is a world all shimmering skyscapes, the land itself reduced to a stage for beholding the upper and outer reaches, whose demarcations are set by lone stars that "sparkle flat out east and west/ north and south."

In "The Great Blue," James Ballowe has fashioned an exquisitely measured love poem, its languorous trance an apt timbre for a work that both mourns the poisoning of Nature's bounty (in particular, at the site of Illinois river banks), and celebrates the heron's transcendent soaring "upstream." In the poem's redemptive final lines, Ballowe masterfully yokes his beloved's spirit to the saving glory of the bird's swooping trajectory:

I knew then how with this bird
you would identify as if in that great
fowl's flight you'd found your spirit's place
after a life of haunting river banks
from which so much that once was free has gone.

After so much loss of the purity of Nature to human tampering, what can yet be salvaged, what redeemed? That is perhaps Ballowe's most imposing theme in this enchanting lyric. Indeed, it's amazing how much implicit strength of message is condensed in the single two-stanza sentence of "The Great Blue":

On the morning the great blue heron flew upstream
and you weren't there to see him rise unsteadily
then glean grace from a single determined flap
of his enormous wings. . .

That one long sentence, a lovely expansive syntactical unit, hovers--in suspension--like the "single determined flap" of the blue heron's "enormous wings" as it launches its near-effortless flight. The graceful weave of Ballowe's free verse line measure seems to be modeled after the "undulating" moves of the bird as it flies over the river. The heron's momentary clumsiness while beginning its ascent is adroitly evoked by the poet's wavers line rhythm ("to see him rise unsteadily"), the line then modulating into a surety of poise as the bird, too, takes command of his adjusted upsweep. Following the springy lilt and bounce of that first stanza, which rhythmically articulates the stages of the heron's flight, a reader is stunned by the wonderful slowing effect of the opening line in stanza two, "I knew then how with this bird...." We are surprised to note that every monosyllabic word in this string of spondees can carry a full stress. The marked retardation of the poem's meter, here, musically enhances the leap of spirit that the speaker bequeather to his loved one: indeed, his vision enacts the mating of two kindred spirits, hers and the bird's ("you would identify"), whereby she may triumph over the lost beauties of the nature hikes that nourished her youth ("a life of haunting river banks/ from which so much that once was free has gone").

As Dave Etter says in his modest prefatory note, his working aesthetic for poems is "ordered simplicity," a level and gauge for his art that he claims he draws from the locale itself. But despite his low-keyed aspiration, he keeps finding lavish resources for poignancy in the unglamorous prairieland. Hence, his mastery of a style that may seem to belie his commitment to plain observation. In his richer passages, many lines are studded with epiphanies:

Ragged leaves and cigar wrappers
scurry across the beaten grass.
The river waters my dusty eyes.
Stray-dog sunlight tongues a pale petal
that is shaped like a gambler's hand.
Thunder booms in the west
and all the sailing clouds come home.
Drops of rainfall, big as walnuts.
. . . . .(From "Up the Illinois River")

Etter's images, unfolding with the ordinary charm of those thick rain droplets, catch us off guard every time--the separate units of rainfall were big "walnuts" in disguise. The amazing epiphany lurks everyplace, hid just below the surface of the usual average facts of nature, "Twilight comes, slime-green and eerie."

The shocks of Etter's many small explosions of style are intensified by the lean spare cadence of his natural rhythms, his graceful relaxed line flow. So close to common speech is his colloquial language, the fierce verbs and nouns spring alive with unexpected brie, their vivacity heightened by the prevailing ease of delivery, "Stray-dog sunlight tongues a pale petal. . ."

The flat prairiescape of "small-town Illinois," chosen hallowed ground of Etter's life and art from the first, constantly begets marvels of illumination from the apparently placid loams of cornfields and riverbanks:

The boy who moves out of the lamplight
has a guitar as big as God.
If he plunks just one taut string,
I will explode a thousand images.

Like that boy with the outsize guitar, the poet fashions "a thousand" dazzling beauties from the modest everyday particulars and humble abodes of lower-class fieldhands and laborers. Notably, his various single-line sentences, each a contained flash of vivid nature imagines--"Off to the south, a feather of smoke. . . / Now the air is soft, belly smooth"--are Dave Etter's magical strummings of that guitar's "one taut string."

Dave Etter and John Knoepfle, both astonishingly prolific, are beautiful natural writers whose many short poems have sprung forth like blossoms from a flowering prairie hedge. In Knoepfle's "Mclean County," the faithful landscape, the earth itself, seems to exhale its own vocabulary--the poet merely snaps it up, snatches it out of the wind:

this is a country of moraines
old prairies could have
gone on forever
mounds timbers points
groves islands savannas
a language of prairies

The poet's tranced flow creates for the reader the lovely illusion of finding the words ready-made, lying in wait in Nature. In poem after poem, we suppose that by an effortless magic Knoepfle merely takes up the verbiage that is wafted to him in the sensory breezes:

farmhouses on the high places
barns outbuildings
washed in the clean air--

the measure is so free of willfulness or authorial manipulation, this artist seems to cultivate a passive style of receiving, rather than aggressively concocting, his verses. Hence, we get the impression of pure spontaneity from Knoepfle's mode of free verse.

The John Knoepfle poem, as a whole, reads like a sequence of brief haikuesque sketches, or vignettes. Each stanza is fashioned as a modest word packet, shaped less by conventional syntax, perhaps, than an abbreviated vocal shorthand--slices of speech, say, transcribed naturally from the land, the birds and flowers, the farm crops:

corn fields and soybean
enough for everyone

Again, the voices that populate this author's verse seem to spring--unmediated by private ego or personality--directly from the locale, the mystic prairiescape.

In the otherwise bleak nature setting of Lisel Mueller's desolate poem "Scenic Route," a mere two lines out of twenty-one are allocated to the solaces of country life, as opposed to city life, that endure today:

Someone always traded
the lonely beauty
of hemlock and stony lakeshore
for survival, packed up his life
and drove off to the city. (bold mine)

The title is grimly ironic, since it sharply evokes overtones of better days in the recent past when this site and its row of stately houses were perhaps widely esteemed as an idyllic prototype of the rustic life. Mueller's quiet austere style is suavely pitched to the ever-dimming luster of this fallen showplace. By subtle tonal shifts and darkening shades, a reader is escorted across this rural homestead from which all signs of fertile life are progressively drained away. The power of understatement in her flatly colloquial lines underscores the sad fate of humans who, in their fear of Nature's "lonely beauty," shall soon forfeit their contract to country living and desert all claims to the land: "When we come this way again. . . Fields will have taken over."

This poem's remarkable modulation of Mueller's images from glum to glummer bespeaks the perfect tuning of her instrument in the low-keyed registers of our human voice. Restraint of speech and spareness of measure have been dependable hallmarks of Lisel Mueller's stunning artistry throughout the several decades of her rich career, and these tools of her craft are shown to best advantage when, as in "Scenic Route," they are employed in the service of a nobly tragic theme:

Someone was always leaving
and never coming back.
The wooden houses wait like old wives
along this road; they are everywhere,
abandoned, leaning, turning away.

Likening the deserted houses to old wives, perhaps widowed or dumped by their mates, is an ingenious trove, one that opens the poem at a very advanced stage of elegiac mourning--so much ravagement has already befallen the houses, how much worse can things get? In this somber vision, there's always leeway for dearth of heart to sink a few more notches into gloom:

When we come this way again
the trees will have gone wild,
the houses collapsed, not even worth
the human act of breaking in.

In Mueller's fancied pall of the future, even petty thieves will be too disaffected and estranged from this doomed site to steal.

While at one extreme, Lisel Mueller ominously forecasts that the history of our country life, all rural fecundity, may grind down to a spiritual dead end, at the other pole, Kevin Stein witnesses, in the course of his bucolic stroll with friends, a great resurgence of spirit that comes with the advent of "middle-age." Stein's tangy opulent poem, "In March, where the Kickapoo Bends," recounts a casual Nature Hike. Three friends ambling through the woods find themselves embarking, unexpectedly, on the great drama of Coming of Age. The interior journey of their spirits, cloaked by the wonderful lush catalog of trees and flowers encountered, burgeons at last into a profound rite of passage from youth to maturity.

Stein deploys an intoxicatingly rich palette of sensual images--the splurge of musical names and exotic troves limping that array of flowers proves a heady feast for the reader:

. . . the lone
jack-in-the-pulpit rising like sex after sixty
. . . down through damp
folds of Solomon 's seal, both false and real,
through May Apple's raised umbrellas
And multiflora rose someone's good intentions
had made tangled pest. . .

At first reading, this voluptuous language of Stein's poetical arboretum--his portrayals of trees, weeds and flowers woven like so many wild vines on the trellis of his looping intricate long sentences--seems a pure joy of description. But we soon discover that the speaker and his friends will undergo nurturing exchanges with Nature: they are not merely passing through these woods ("three of us walked, but that was hardly all"). Their lives are shaken and permanently altered by these botanic marvels, which provide a surfeit of saving nuances for those who are on the right wavelength to receive the prairieland's gifts.

Kevin Stein's images are a special blend. They cut two ways. The "jack-in-the-pulpit" and "Solomon's seal," for example, hold a mirror up to the humans, reflecting changes in their erotic makeup as they age. A deep sensual interchange between ourselves and the other life forms, flora and fauna of our native locale, is the compelling theme of Stein's singular vision. And nowhere is this message more vividly enacted than in the crackling simultaneity of images at the poem's finish:

. . . our steps flushed
doves whose wings burst like feathered laughter.
We gave thanks. Bells rang silent blue, blue--
warm beer as explosive as middle-age
we once blithely swore we'd never reach.

Two outbursts, two flareups, beautifully coincide in this passage, the shock of the doves' arousal, and the resonating shock of spiritual arrival in the minds of the three tipsy walkers.