Rudy Burckhardt,
Contd
By DEBORAH
GARWOOD
Rudy Burckhardt
Ant 1994
gelatin silver print, 13-1/8 x 10 inches including poem
This and all images, Estate of Rudy Burckhardt, courtesy Tibor de Nagy
Gallery, New York
The ant ran up the white
birch tree
where are you going?
How should I know
anywhere my feet will take me
higher and higher down again
but up is better you'll agree
just follow me
-Rudy Burckhardt poem added
to Ant
The Studio School displays
a selection of 36 small scale paintings and photographs Burckhardt worked
on during his summers in Maine from 1956 until the year of his death,
1999. This show, also curated by Vincent Katz, follows a broadly chronological
sequence as it circles through the gallery's rooms. Several of Burckhardt's
films were screened on the evening of June 12 to an audience packed
into the gallery.
Rudy Burckhardt's Maine starts off with Evening Sky, a quietly impressive,
small sized but vastly scaled landscape photo taken one twilight in
1956. The time worn farmhouse nestled on the horizon is surely the family's
new summer home. A single wildflower photographed in 1999, sporting
Ant Poem below it in the same mat, concludes the exhibition.
Tree Chaos
Vertical 1999
oil on linen, 17 x 9 inches
In between, the show rolls
out paintings and photos of all sizes and formats made during the intervening
decades. The Maine forest is primitive in botanical terms. Pines, ferns,
birch trees, bays and marshes coexist in a delicate, symbiotic equilibrium.
Five studies of tree bark and lichen, all dating from the 1990s, alternate
painted and photographic close ups emphasizing organic formal patterns.
Other close up views of ferns and plants, rendered in both media, range
in time from the 1970s to the 1980s and 1990s. A number of works describe
fallen trees; disruption in the woods is shown in Woods (silver print,
1971), Broken Tree V (oil on canvas, 1997), Framed Fall (silver print,
1990s), Tree Chaos Vertical (oil on linen, 1999), and Woods in Sunlight
(silver print, 1999). A couple of photos stand alone for their special
use of light and silver. Deer Isle Inlet II, 1955, is a horizon-free
invitation into a meandering estuary of gleaming water and soft marsh
grasses. Sky in Middle (1990s) emphasizes verticality in its composition
of tree tops nearly closing over the road. A picture of rain filled
puddles on a graded dirt road suggests that there was time to revel
in lightfall and stony textures after a storm one day in Searsmount
(1992).
Woods in
Sunlight 1999
gelatin silver print, 11 x 8 inches
The paintings' palette of
permanent green, earth mineral reds, ochres, browns, and cobalt-tints
for the sky is realistic and expository. No tricks here, just applied
observation and painterly depiction. But the effect of some paintings
was highly sensory. A synthesis of color in fern fronds set against
ochre tones of sunlight on the forest floor bounces to the viewer, warms
the eye, and exudes dust, heat, and fragrance in Ferns 2, 1987. Pine,
1985, is an powerful study of the interior branches of one tree. Consistently
sized brush marks paint the bark's siennas and blacks in high contrast
counterpoint with blue sky and pale masses of green birch leaves. It's
a busy yet fresh and clear vision. A photo of the tree silhouetted within
its surroundings, dating from 1996, hangs nearby.
The Studio School show witnesses Burckhardt getting acquainted with
one landscape deeply. In effect, a ritual or meditative quality comes
through in the Maine paintings and photos that's quite different from
the city scenes. Painting as the slow flexing of thought is matched
by photography as the quicksilver exercise of thought. The gallery's
screening of several Burckhardt color and black and white films on June
12 provided greater insight into this idea. Techniques of time lapse
photography showing clouds billowing over a landscape, or animation
techniques applied to roving packs of pine cones, add layers of complexity
to the visual narrative while demonstrating what might be called mind
over media. The speeds and colors of life, film, thoughts, and paint
are calibrated without fussing over conventional notions of time.
Burckhardt's vision shuttled consistently between the close-up and the
long view or large scale. He kept it simple by sticking to up, down,
and lateral views. Swooping changes in scale embrace the whole environment;
cities as well as the woods present opportunities to reflect on ways
to think about it. An ant's physical size gives it a different relationship
to gravity, as mobile as the camera. Ant Poem captures the idea nicely
- a small but confident consciousness moving up, expanding its field
of awareness toward a vast if not infinite amplitude. To get where you're
going, take the next step, and look around at the world.
Ferns II
1987
oil on linen, 32 x 36 inches
