Art Journey America : Landscapes – 89 Painters’ Perspectives.
Edited by Kathryn Kipp
In our modern world where America is often associated with technology, business and industry, it’s easy to overlook the fact that the American continent also offers a vast array of stunning landscapes. Photography is one way of appreciating this natural beauty, but another is through the more subjective lens of the artist’s eye. This volume is testament to this range of natural beauty and individual talent in recreating it.
Kipp is an experienced arts editor and has edited more than 200 previous titles. In this book, she gathers together lush colour plates of works from eighty nine contemporary US landscape painters. The variety of colours, textures and locations is wide, and the paintings vibrant and mesmerising. Here are stormy seas, craggy mountains, rural settlements, rustic glades and urban cityscapes in all seasons, mediums and techniques. Some are in the realist tradition, others shout with the joyful colours of the Fauves. Some are tranquil, others infused with a sense of unease. The cluster of clouds above the dark factory chimneys in Arthur Chartow’s painting suggest ominous portent. Nancy Bush’s blurred, impressionistic twilight horizon throbs with the ebbing strains of the sun’s orange glow. Gordon Brown’s stirring sea around rocks is timeless, its turquoise waters concealing the history of thousands of years. Arturo Chavez paints a magnificent view of the sun-baked red mountains of New Mexico. Lorenzo Chavez brings us an idyllic house on a hillside, but the ghosts of previous occupants are marked by graves. Len Chmiel’s winter wonderland shows the stirring of spring in the cold, green river water flowing through the ice. A pair of birds skim the wind over a field of golden crops in Brian Cobble’s painting. David Drummond’s still water reflects the rocks above it. Snow is furrowed into tyre tracks in Josh Elliot’s Montana road, the sunlight reflected off the white, blue shadows marking the snow. Max Ferguson’s city road is covered in snow and imbued with the yellow of the winter dusk streetlight. Peter Fiore’s gorgeous Pennysylvania countryside could be a work from the Glasgow Boys, full of light and plant life.
These are just pages opened at random from the first 50 pages of this 192 page book. The quality of the works is consistently high. Materials used range from oils to pastels to acrylics to watercolour. Each plate is adjacent to a page of text with information about the artist and questions and answers about the inspiration behind that particular piece, their preferred locations, seasons and mediums, and advice they may like to impart to readers.
This is a glorious, uplifting tome, a beautiful object for art lovers and artists over which to pore and dream.
