THE NEW YORK SUN, THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2005 Finding Fiction in the Wilderness By Maureen Mullarkey Neil Welliver (1929-2005) will be greatly missed. Cadres of young painters emulation his panoptic blend of abstraction and reality testify to his influence on the unfolding story of American landscape painting. A memorial exhibition opening today at Alexandre Gallery presents large-scale painting from the late 1970s and mid-1980s, plus a generous selection of plein air oil studies and recent prints—aquatints, etchings, and woodcuts – produced in collaboration with Welliver’s longtime master printmaker, Shigemitsu Tsukaguchi. An exile from Modernism despite his attraction to its freedoms, Welliver put the conventions of Abstract Expressionism to the work of depiction. Compelled by what Henry James termed “ the solidity of specification,” he honored the same perceptual concerns that occupied American masters from the beginning. Unblinking, almost clinical in its detachment, his painting asserts the fecundity of the phenomenal world without sentimentality or romanticism. But his objectivity does not obscure the pictorial cunning and stamina of his combat with untamed disorder. Landscape painting is a work of fiction: the accumulation of things chosen – colors, contrasts, shapes, masses, lines – amid the result of things discarded. Though he began his paintings outdoors, Welliver completed them in the studio; a rigorous series of manual steps (no projection shortcuts) translated a small plein air study first to a large drawing, then to the canvas, altering it along the way. As Welliver told John Ashbery in 1985: “I am not interested in ‘painting from nature.’ I’m not interested in that at all.” What did interest him? Welliver came to prominence in the 1960s as a painter seeking “a new paradigm for representation,” as the gallery states. But the man was ultimately compelled by more than pressures of style. Post-expressionist models might explain the painter’s choice of method, but they sidestep the living heart of his work: the passion that animates it after the stylistic moment is past. Reading Welliver’s obituary, you marvel that the sorrow of living did not kill him before this. In 1970 a studio fire destroyed much of his work. An infant daughter died in her crib, and his wife died shortly afterward. Later, one son was murdered in Thailand and another died in unspecified circumstances. To bury one child is an insupportable grief; to bury three is a descent into the abyss. What, then, made this un-Providential world worth representing? The answer brings us closer to Herman Melville than to Clement Greenberg. The Maine woodlands were Welliver’s white whale, the protean thing that makes visible the facelessness of God and the inscrutability of existence. Nothing comfortable or picturesque exists in his unconcerned wilderness. Welliver turns the concentrated labor of painting into confrontation with the terrible beauty of insensate natural forces; unblinking, he refuses to look away. Blasted trees, dense vegetation, glacial deposits, rushing streams and rivers – all are analogous to Melville’s “great shroud of the sea.” Nature, star and wild, rolls now as it did thousands of years ago, amputating lives like limbs. “Old Windfall” (1981-82), a dazzling map of a swath of second-growth forest, defies the confusions of raw nature. An intricate weave of light and shadow sets the eye bounding through a welter of growth and decay to the tight mesh of trees that obscures everything beyond middle distance. Fairfield Porter’s dictum that modern painting disallows foreground and background is technically obeyed in Welliver’s habit of working methodically and diagonally from one corner to another. But his drawing observes perspectival courtesies, and warm tones dominate only in the foreground. Our eyes do the rest, pushing smaller trees back to where we know they belong. Pattern is the primary ordering element in “Blueberries in Fissures” (1983). A blueberry barren, yellow-green and orange shot through with magenta, runs in rivulets down the cracked face of glacial boulder like blood from a wound. The height and curve of the rock are suggested by calligraphic pines clinging to the crest of pitiless habitat. Welliver’s prints at Alexandre are a compelling window into his artistry. More intimate in size and serene in surface, they convey a tenderness toward his motifs that is often overwhelmed in heroic-sized paintings. The luminous, absorbent white of fine paper, softer than the cool, reflective light of his paintings, is particularly receptive to his purposes, blotting up brush strokes and further harmonizing a random variety of shapes. “Stump” (2000), a woodcut depicting a moss-and lichen-covered tree stub rooted among ferns and bracken, is heart-stopping. This riot of forms required 27 hand-carved blocks, 30 colors, and four years to complete. Equally beautiful is the austere black and white woodcut “Islands – Allagash” (1990). Simplicity of means belies the genius of the image, bisected by the light of the moon. THE NEW YORK OBSERVER, SEPTEMBER 26, 2005 Welliver Captured Nature’s Logic With a Serenely Intractable Visio By MARIO NAVES Neil Welliver, the American artist who died last spring at the age of 75, was one hell of a painter, and if you want a surefire way of confirming it, go to the memorial exhibition mounted at Alexandre Gallery, take advantage of the bench in the main gallery, and take a good, hard gander at Back of Hatchet (1978), a depiction of birch trees in winter painted on a swath of canvas measuring eight by 10 feet. Note the crisp, almost clinical lucidity with which Welliver delineated the dense forest, seeming to capture every wiry twist and turn of the leafless branches. Marvel at how he retained the bracing blue of the sprawling Maine sky, seen through the thicket in the distance. Realize that though the palette is limited, it’s effect is nevertheless expansive, an illusion aided by three green trees placed precisely and unexpectedly in the foreground. Finally, scratch your head at how a picture so true to life – to the light, weep and untamed logic of nature – could simultaneously have so little to do with representation. Welliver didn’t care about representation. You don’t have tot get up close to the canvas – with its confounding network of drawling and, at times, impatient slurs of buttery oil paint – to sense Welliver’s remove from observed phenomenon or his not altogether unskeptical debt to Abstract Expressionism. You can read his motivations in the insistent, all-but-manic attention paid to every last inch of the composition and in the way clarity of definition keeps the image resolutely on the surface of the canvas. Welliver was an impudent painter: He set up certain expectations (ah, the grandeur of nature!) only to thumb his nose at them (it’s just colored mud on a piece of rag). That paradox is inherent to the art of painting, of course, but rarely has it been brought to such a relentlessly inflexible conclusion. The accompanying prints are merely fetching in comparison, and the smaller canvases are muddled. Oil paint and a massive scale were integral to Welliver’s coolly intractable vision. Luckily for us, five other big pictures tag alongside Back of Hatchet, offering plenty to take pleasure in.