Valley fever
Exhibit offers artist's-eye view of local landscape
August 10, 2003 By : Victoria Dalkey
Section: TICKET Bee Art Correspondent
Page: TK15 ART
Gertrude Stein once said of Oakland that there was no "there"
there. Apparently, many early California artists felt the same
way about the Sacramento Valley. Though Albert Bierstadt did
paint it once in a large scene of rolling meadows and flatlands
with a small image of the state Capitol in the distance, there
are not many images of the Central Valley in early California
art. Largely it was bypassed for more picturesque sites: Yosemite,
the Sierra Nevada, the Southern California coast and the Monterey
peninsula.
In recent years, however, the Valley has become a preoccupation
among artists of the Sacramento region. In the 1950s, Wayne
Thiebaud, Patrick Dullanty and Gregory Kondos began addressing
the unique characteristics of the flatlands and wetlands around
California's capital. They were eventually joined by a younger
generation of artists - Michael Tompkins, Pat Mahony and Boyd
Gavin among them - who focus on the local landscape.
"Sacramento Valley Landscape Painters," the first
of three exhibitions planned at the John Natsoulas Gallery,
documents what Natsoulas calls the Sacramento Valley school
of landscape painting, from early works by H. Nelson Poole,
Maynard Dixon and Oliver Gagliani to recent landscapes by Thiebaud,
Dullanty and Mahony. It's a big show, taking up all three floors
of the gallery, that, with the next two exhibitions, will form
the basis for a major monograph on the artwork of the Sacramento
Valley by Natsoulas and Don Hagerty, an expert on the works
of Maynard Dixon and a scholar of the art and culture of the
American West.
The exhibition is amplified by fascinating historical photographs,
maps and drawings of the Sacramento Valley on loan from the
Shields Library at the University of California, Davis, and
the California State Library. Among the treasures are a photo
of the Sacramento River before there were levees, Andrew Putnam
Hill's primitive portrayal of a Yolo County farm in 1873 and
Augustus Koch's wonderfully detailed overhead view of Sacramento
with a watery swamp in front of the Southern Pacific Railroad
station, done in 1871. Informative wall texts throughout the
exhibition cast light on the history and topography of the region.
Though the exhibition is not arranged in chronological order,
all three floors contain historical materials so that a sense
of context is provided as you move throughout the show. Among
the early works on the first floor are Dixon's understated evocation
of scintillating summer heat in "Erosion," a 1921
scene of dry yellow fields cut into by wind and water, and Gagliani's
lush green view of an orchard near Vacaville done in 1938.
There are a number of works in this section by Gary Ernest Smith,
an artist from Utah who visits the Sacramento Valley each year
to search for interesting pictorial sites. They range from an
almost minimally simple scene of a large barn rising up from
a textured field of yellow grasses to a more detailed scene
of hay bales and fields that captures the heat of a summer day
in the valley's farmlands.
Among the large works that stand out are D.A. Bishop's nearly
pop realist painting of a checkpoint house on the Delta, the
late Roy Tellefson's romantic view of orange clouds over a rusty
autumn pear orchard and David De Cristoforo's gutsy abstract
vision of an animated sky over a verdant landscape.
But there are some marvelous small works, too, ranging from
David D'Angelo's round vignettes of Delta landscapes done in
the 1960s to Matt Bult's lively pastels of the Valley in midday
and at sunset and Diana Childress' sensitive, delicate, atmospheric
oil of hills near Vacaville.
The valley's agricultural landscape is the focus of several
works on the gallery's second floor. Boyd Gavin gives us two
bold and dashingly painted scenes of Delta farms with trucks
and farm machinery parked in front of outbuildings. Smith offers
a subtle and fresh scene of cows in front of a moss-covered
barn, and Chella shows charming, small, painterly images of
black and white cows in a farmyard and a young orchard receding
in the distance from a flowering tree in the foreground.
Natsoulas saves the heavy hitters for the top floor. Thiebaud,
who has turned to visionary scenes of the Delta in his latest
works, gives us a scintillating painting of a swollen, brown
river banked by hallucinatory trees cutting through patterned
fields in brilliant hues of orange, yellow and blue. Kondos
offers a thin and ghostly oil titled "Abandoned River"
that reduces his simplified vision of the river to nearly minimal
terms. Dullanty delights with a wonderfully rich oil of the
abandoned sugar-beet factory near Clarksburg and a strong pastel
of a river marina.
Terry Pappas presents several of her serene scenes of the American
River, including one of a lonely boy wading in the river and
a subtle and silvery scene of a mirrorlike river in winter.
Mahony blends realism and abstraction in her warm-toned scenes
of the river and farmlands, and Gavin gives us a bold painting
of a fisherman in hip boots angling on the American.
The Natsoulas show demonstrates that there is indeed a "there"
there, a there of flatlands that allow you to see for miles
and miles without interruption; a there full of waterways where
you can fish and swim and frolic; a there colored by light filtered
through hot summer air and cool, foggy mornings; a there that
sustains us, delights us and sometimes aggravates us with its
harshness and the continuing loss of farmlands and wetlands.
A there that is unrelentingly ours.
Sacramento Valley Landscape Painters
WHEN: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesdays-Fridays, noon to 5 p.m. Saturdays-Sundays
through Aug. 31
WHERE: John Natsoulas Gallery, 521 First St., Davis
INFORMATION: (530) 756-3938 |