In the Landscape: Four Painters — Four Seasons
David B. Boyce - Guest Curator
In the Landscape: 4 Painters — 4 Seasons is the result of setting four superb painters free to explore the cycle of seasons.
Curator David B. Boyce notes: “The painters participating in In The Landscape have been brought together because of their shared interests in landscape painting. They are also all New Englanders and while each has a connection to the Swain School of Design in New Bedford, that was mere coincidence, although landscape painting was a favorite subject of the Swain School painting faculty. Diane Cournoyer (spring), Ben Martinez (summer), Stephen Remick (winter) and Nancy Train Smith (autumn) were each assigned a season in painting, and they have produced work that honors brilliantly those four periods of the year.”
Paintings by:
Winter: Stephen Remick
"Backyard"
Stephen Remick
Artist's Statement
Snow-cover unifies and distills. I found this to be helpful while re-grouping from a previous series.
I’m attracted to things built or left by others that really weren’t intended to be objects to contemplate. This started with a previous stonewall series (inspired by a Robert Frost poem) and branched off from there to woodpiles, abandoned cellar holes, surveyor’s ribbon…
These were made originally for utilitarian reasons (except for the occasional snowman) with time, labor, and thought spent creating them. However, they now evoke a deeper meaning when taken out of context either through time or viewpoint.
If, along with this new meaning they were visually striking, I felt a need to paint them, to repurpose them. To make people aware not only of the beauty and importance of the objects themselves but to empathize with similar experiences, imagined back stories, and the analogies they generate.
Along with these subjects there is simply the unavoidable beauty of a winter landscape that just needs to be painted.
Spring: Diane Cournoyer
"Entangled"
Diane Cournoyer
Artist's Statement
Though somewhat of an assignment, this grouping of paintings, ‘spring’ materialized at an appropriate time. Coming off another landscape series (Nature Narrative) it led me to open up my palette… I was prepared to dance with the color green…or so I believed. I find that acidy green, the color which occurs at the burst of tree blossoms, to be very visually exciting.
So goes the experiment. I confess, subject matter is secondary and emphasis is put on design – line, space and color. I’m surprised by my own statement…the use of the word ‘color’…a few good artists have recently used the word colorist to describe my work. I’m doubtful yet hopeful.
As artists we hold within us that subconscious impulse to let go and discover the wonders of pleasant accidents (tunneled through of course with a lifetime of accumulated educational data). So, as these paintings evolved they unfolded another theme of which I’m calling ‘portals’…looking past or through the trees…the openings between objects. It’s this gap that I find most interesting as I can shift the space with a color.
As an artist, living in the Berkshires has provided me with an abundance of visual stimulation… nature and, the color green. But my connection with the city of New Bedford is invaluable. I am thrilled to be exhibiting amongst this group of talented painters.
Summer: Ben Martinez
"The Brown Family"
Ben Martinez
Artist's Statement
"All that I try to do is to make something look as beautiful as it looks. I never try to "improve" or "arrange" or "compose”. The abstract painter Franz Kline once told some students that all that was necessary in painting the visible world was to put down a red where you see a red, and to put down a blue where you see a blue. "And" added Kline "it's the most difficult thing in the world."
Fall: Nancy Train Smith
"Hosta"
Nancy Train Smith
Artist's Statement
"It is always interesting to reflect back on a completed body of work, and I am grateful to the NBAM for affording me an opportunity to do so. Fall has always been my favorite season with the deepening of color, angle of light, and the bittersweet sense of time’s passage. These paintings though done in different years, have one essential element in common. In all of them I was looking at a slice of the natural world with an eye to finding some underlying “armature” or shape upon which the image could be “hung”. This fundamental organizing principal is something I bring to painting from my work as a sculptor, and is my most important tool in taming the raw two dimensional space of the panel."
