Sarah McCoubrey,
a mid-career landscape painter with Philadelphia roots, often goes
in search of beauty in the gullies and back roads near her home
in upstate New York. Inspired by Northern European landscape painting
and American painting of the Hudson Valley school, she's apparently
stumbled (in these weedy landscapes) upon a completely new recipe
for authentic and unsentimental landscape painting. She looks for
transitional, marginal places in the magnificent landscape around
her, and finds man-made marks and damage, as well as the natural
process of recovery.
The exhibition, McCoubrey's second
at Locks, contains 20 oil paintings on paper or panel made over
the past three years, and reveals her process as a painter. Eight
plein-air oil-on-paper studies document her quick comprehension
of the landscape. She paints with energy, yet very neatly, combining
disorderly events in the landscape with subtle harmony. Red
Sign (2000, 11-1/2 inches by 12 inches), for instance, shows
a tiny red diamond-shaped sign in a dreary winter landscape. Dead
plants cover the ground in a delicate muddle of gold, brown and
gray brushstrokes and a series of puddles reflect a milky white
light. Above, murky gray-violet clouds have just a bit of pale
blue sky showing through.
Another study, Signs (2000, 12
inches by 11-3/8 inches) meticulously but freely documents three
signs in a deep bank of vines and brush, at the peak of summer.
McCoubrey uses many of her oil studies to produce detailed oil-on-panel
paintings in her studio. This process allows McCoubrey to patiently
reinterpret the studies, adding and emphasizing details, sharpening
the focus of her eye on the landscape. As a result, the paintings
convey the experience of the artist working in the landscape,
thorn-scratched and mosquito-bitten, and almost seem to exude
the smell of weeds and mud, the rustling of leaves and the whirring
of nearby expressways.
The humidity and hazy light of late summer
can be felt in Christmas Trees (2002, 24 inches by 22 inches),
which shows a huge strip of land marred by high-tension power
lines. The mass of grasses, brush and trees in which the poles
and lines are nestled is made of a rich density of paint, built
up from many layers of thin glazes and thick bundles of marks
and hatching. Tiny hairlike brushstrokes in olive green, augmented
with turquoise and salmon-pink, deliciously describe a bank of
distant pine trees. A sign advertising Christmas trees and a bright
red bollard seem to pull the space open in the center, while power
lines drape across the landscape and carve the sky into patchwork
strips of blue and gray.
A group of new paintings, Snook's Pond
Estates I, II, and III (all 2002, 13 inches by 11 inches)
offer an even more compelling vision of the landscape. McCoubrey
wanted to show the "transition of a favorite swimming pond
into a residential development, and to focus on the specific details
of that transition." Each painting describes, with loving
attentiveness, a single newly planted tree with a spiraling white
bandage around its trunk and a fluttering pink ribbon tied to
a low branch. In Snook's Pond Estates III, the dark foreground,
covered with scrubby plants and trash, is contrasted with glowing
tree-covered hills in the distance. The landscape is filled with
carefully knitted-in suggestions of human use and abuse of the
land: a distant house, a sign, a bit of greenish trash, a power
line. In the midst of this sadness, the bare branches of the young
tree reach awkwardly upward from the earth into a sky marbled
with pure blue and gray clouds tinged with pink.
The great scientist Edward O. Wilson wrote:
"The natural world is everywhere disappearing before our
eyes -- cut to pieces, mowed down, plowed under, gobbled up, replaced
by human artifacts." He also observed, somewhat hopefully,
that "untrammeled nature exists in the dirt and rotting vegetation
beneath our feet." These magnificent new paintings by Sarah
McCoubrey communicate her intense affection for her surroundings
and allow us to take a good hard look at the lost paradise of
the American landscape.
-Susan
Hagen, October 2002
for
more information on this exhibition, click here |
