Idyllic but real landscapes and dystopian now
By Alec Clayton
Published in the Weekly Volcano, March 21, 2019
study for “Joyce’s Ravine,” oil on paper, by Kathy Gore Fuss, photo courtesy the artist |
Digital photo by Kathy Gore Fuss in collaboration with Carl Chew |
I thought
the art of landscape painting had reached an unstoppable point of redundancy at
which original landscapes were no longer possible, and then Olympia artist
Kathy Gore Fuss started painting in nature in all sorts of weather amongst the
trees in Priest Point Park and the industrial business of the Port of Olympia.
Her landscapes are not bombastic or gimmicky; they are realistic,
straightforward interpretations of what she sees in nature. And yet they are as
unique as anything painted from nature since Wayne Thiebaud started painting the hills of San Francisco.
Lately,
Gore Fuss has expanded her artistic repertoire to digital photos, including
drone photos, that are manipulated by her collaborators, John Carlton and Carl
Chew. The resulting exhibition of paintings, drawings and digital photographs
at University of Puget Sound’s Kittredge Gallery weds styles that go back
hundreds of years to those that reach into the future to display the artist’s
love or nature and concern over what is happening in our world today.
The most
stunning thing in the gallery has to be the huge landscape painting “Joyce’s
Ravine,” 6-by-9 feet, that is suspended from
the ceiling in front of the back wall. This painting is the first thing to hit
the viewers’ eyes when entering the gallery, and it cannot be ignored. It pictures
the depths of the forest in bright, sunlit colors with a rich tangle of leaves
and vines and tree trunks with a fallen tree trunk front and center.
Stylistically it is somewhat like paintings by Paul Cezanne, which is not to
say it is simply a takeoff on his manner or painting.
There is a
group of soft charcoal drawings with marvelous details of leaves and vines that
sparkle with light despite their lack of color,
due in large part to Gore Fuss’s manner of outlining the shapes of leaves in
sharp black lines and leaving the flat faces of the leaves the white of the
paper.
A suite of
11 small drawings in walnut ink explore the spatial depths of forests in sepia
tones with whites that sparkle like gems and an incredible tangle of leaves and
vines.
familiar Olympia scenes with crowded with oil
derricks of the kind that can only exist in deep water. There’s a massive,
intrusive derrick in front of the capitol dome, behind which billow clouds of
black smoke; there’s one next to Olympia’s
City Hall, and others by Sylvester Park and Heritage Park — all of these sites being well inland and uphill
from any location where such behemoths could possibly exist. These disturbing
dystopian scenes are beautifully photographed and digitally put together so
skillfully as to appear that they exist together in reality.
And
finally, there are the photographs taken with a drone and digitally manipulated
by Chew. In one we see the artist standing in a shallow stream holding in her
hand the control for the drone with which the photo was taken. And there are
many of her receding in the distance. In
another we see an aerial view of Gore Fuss’s house with its garden repeated and
mirroring itself to become a kind of enclave
surrounded by hedges that protectively seal it from the outer world. In
reference to this one, she spoke of the invasive nature of modern technology —
laughing at herself for invading her own privacy with a drone.
This
exhibition is filled with beautiful, thought-provoking
and technically skillful works of art.
Kathy Gore
Fuss, 10
a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday-Friday; noon-5 p.m., Saturday, through April 20, Kittredge
Gallery at University of Puget Sound, 1500 N. Warner St., Tacoma, 253.879.
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