ARTIcLES / REVIEWS

 

Clear Vision

By John O’Hern

 

American landscape painting began before the birth of the Republic.  Painters emigrated from Europe and began to record images of the landscape of the New World, a landscape strange and awe inspiring in its variety and vastness.

Z.Z. Wei discovered this new world in 1989.  He came to the United States from China at the invitation of the Washington State Centennial Commission to take part in the Pacific Rim Cultural Connection Project. He was overwhelmed by the new landscape and by the artistic and personal freedom he began to feel. 

He describes his first exposure to the landscape of the Northwest as an “explosion” of awareness of color and form. He began traveling its back roads, observing and absorbing.  “You have to know the land before you paint,” he comments.

Z.Z. fell under the spirit of the landscape that has inspired generations of painters. The landscape that Z.Z. found, however, wasn’t the untouched wilderness his European predecessors discovered.  This landscape bore the marks of the ubiquitous presence of man.  In the past 20 years he has produced a body of responses to this landscape that is a worthy complement to the work of the artists who came before him.

In 1818 Thomas Cole emigrated from England and traveled to New York’s Hudson River Valley.  He was amazed by the differences he experienced between the landscape of his childhood and the vibrant colors of fall in the craggy Catskill Mountains just as Z.Z. was amazed by the unfamiliar landscape of the Pacific Northwest.

Cole was the founder of the country’s first “school” of painting – not really a school, but a group of like-minded painters – the Hudson River School. Between 1825 and 1875, Cole and other painters of the Hudson River School painted the landscape as an expression of the limitless potential of America as well as an expression of Man living in Harmony with Nature and an expression of the presence of God. The mid-nineteenth century painters came to art with a philosophy.  Z.Z. discovered a philosophy in the landscape. 

He cites as one of his influences, Edward Hopper, who imbued his paintings of people going about their lives with an ingenious use of light and shadow to create a mood. Hopper wrote, “Painting will have to deal more fully and less obliquely with life and nature's phenomena before it can again become great.”

Z.Z. instinctively took Hopper’s admonition to respond to “life and nature’s phenomena” and has created a unique vision of the symbiosis between Nature and Man that has created the modern American landscape. 

 

Painting in the 1920s and 30s, Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, and John Steuart Curry depicted the grittiness and the reality of the American landscape and its people. The group have been identified as “Regionalists” because they rejected urban living. Benton said he painted “what was ‘there’.”

Charles Sheeler who painted in the early 20th century had also developed a unique vision portraying the energy of architectural forms abstracting them into representations of the American character.  Sheeler went so far in his worship of architecture that in his painting “American Landscape” the landscape is the buildings and smokestacks of an industrial scene.

Z.Z. has the awareness of the spiritual aspect of Nature espoused by the Hudson River School painters, an appreciation and understanding of rural America that epitomized the Regionalists, and a command of abstraction that characterizes Sheeler.  He has created a vision of America that is his own and one that fits comfortably within the tradition of American landscape painting.

His triptych “Distant Storm” (2000) is a neat synthesis of all that has come before.  The primordial storm and lightning over the mountains, the silos and grain elevators of the farming industry, the cultivated fields of grain, the highway cut through the hills and going on seemingly to infinity, and the ubiquitous American automobile effect a continuity with the past both artistically and historically.

He acknowledges his debt to Benton in his exaggeration of forms, creating an “abstract presence” that would please Sheeler.  The sinuous forms of cars from the 30s and 40s fit right in with the sinuous forms of the landscape.  The cars almost become caricatures of cars, their forms nearly morphing into the carapaces of sea creatures, or snails. To Z.Z. cars and trucks are “like humans in the landscape.”

His painting “In the Country” (2002) illustrates his feeling that the barn is the “cathedral for the farmer” and “more essential than the house.”  The monumental white barn is sunlit against dark clouds that could either bring rain for the fields or winds to destroy them.  Sheeler would have painted the barn with mechanical precision.  Z.Z.’s energetic brush strokes suggest that the building is a living thing, built by living people. A rusting truck from the 50s may be ready for another day’s work or may be slowly returning to the earth.  The ubiquitous Chevy and Ford trucks were the backbone of the development of the farming industry and were often nursed and cajoled to work long beyond their expected lifetime.

He has studied the details and has chosen to represent the essence of the landscape in broadly painted forms that sing with the energy of the land and of its human presence.  He believes that “composition and light reveal energy,” and revels in creating a balance among “tension, power, and calm.”

He insists that his paintings are not pretty.  Nor are they romantic.  They express, he says, “a survival spirit.”  The old barns and trucks, the generations of farmers who have used them and cultivated the soil create what he calls the “character” to the landscape.

“Field of Dreams” (2004) depicts a trusty truck across the path from the tin-roofed barn set among freshly-tilled fields, a grain elevator in the distance.  If the weather cooperates the fields will yield a crop that will itself yield cash to pay bills and, perhaps, to allow a dream or two.  The fecundity of the fields is echoed in the shape of the path behind the barn.  All is rich with potential.  Yet the sky is a deep, clear blue–devoid of rain-bringing clouds.

While many of the paintings contain the aerodynamic cars of decades ago, some show high end cars of a few decades later, abandoned and beginning to rust back into the land.  A fifty-year-old Cadillac coupe in “Crow’s Eye View” (2007) and “Open Doors” (2007) is open to the elements.  When asked if there was a sociological significance to the rusting luxury cars, Z.Z. replied that it is the shape of the vehicles that is important to his composition.  Whereas the bulbous cars of the past were built with character, Z.Z. thinks the newer cars will gain character only after being exposed to the weather. The open doors of “Crow’s Eye View” beckon us into the car as if it could still roar down the highway into town.  The crow on the door seems to be contemplating the same thing, but is there because of his shape and as a compositional element.  As Z.Z. says, “form comes first.”

The open doors of “Open Doors” convey an emptiness, of dreams gone unfulfilled.  The car in the foreground appears long past its days of mobility and the open doors of the barn in the distance, with no visible path worn to them, suggest complete abandonment of both work and dreams.  In contrast, the open barn doors of “Golden Sky Sunset” (2004), the path and truck standing ready, express the promise of a new day.

A rainbow appears as the sun breaks through the clouds of a passing storm in “Awakening” (2001).  This is another of Z.Z.’s compositions that lead the viewer into an unknown future but through a green valley in a parched landscape with the expression of calm after the storm.

The back road travels of Z.Z. and his family have also led them to the desert Southwest.  The long northern shadows of “The Red Barn” (1999) give way to bright sun and organic adobe architecture in “Blue Door” (2009). 

The repeating peaked-roofed shapes of “The Red Barn”, both in the buildings and their shadows, recall the geometries of Sheeler.  The nearly abstracted shapes and the long shadows undulating over the ground and up the barn recall the abstractions of Georgia O’Keefe. The tension of the dark shadows and the confined space between the barns is released through that narrow opening to a view of the brightly-lit distant barn which stands solidly at the horizon seemingly pointing skyward.  This manipulation of space is pure Z.Z. Wei.

This painting is a prime example of his use of composition and light to recreate the energy of a scene.  Tension and power are released – into calm.

“Blue Door” of ten years later is a more subtle composition but similar in many ways.  The shape of the blue door is echoed in the mirror on the truck which brings the eye to the distant mountain of trees.  One of the most magnificent aspects of the skies of Northern New Mexico is the abundance of  luminous billowing clouds that build up over the mountains – often “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” or they bring torrential rains that replenish the aquifers.  For that eventuality, Z.Z. shows us an extraordinarily long canale jutting through the parapet above the window.  The canale allows rain water and melting snow to drain from the roof and away from the house, preventing erosion. As an element in the composition it, too leads the toward the far distance.

Z.Z. identified immediately with the architecture of Santa Fe, built of adobe bricks that are part of the earth.  The more he visits, the more he feels the energy of the place and sees its people connected to the earth.

When Z.Z. refers to adobe buildings being part of the earth he is completely accurate.  Constructed of bricks made of soil and water and then covered with a plaster also made of soil and water, they couldn’t be more of the earth.  Over time, the plaster can crack and break away, allowing water to seep in and damage the bricks.  Additional layers of mud are applied from time to time and the older buildings begin to assume a softened profile that suits his paintings well.

The Romans spoke of the “genius loci” (the protective spirit of the place), often depicted as a snake.  The term, however, has evolved to describe the special ambience of a place.  One can’t but wonder if the original “genius loci” is expressing itself through Z.Z.’s paintings in the form of snake-like shadows and roads.

Unlike his 19th century predecessors of the Hudson River School, Z.Z. Wei doesn’t presume to educate his viewers on philosophy or even theology.  Although he believes “art has to have something to say,”  he also believes that people bring their own ideas to viewing art and it is not his task to provide solutions.

His 2006 painting “Looking Back” will elicit as many different responses as the many different people who see it.  The road winds from one unknown point to another and a driver has paused to look back at the farm literally “in the middle of nowhere.”  Is he looking back at the farm as a relic of the past or a sign of holding out against the odds?  Is he contemplating where’s he’s come from?   Z.Z. could have followed the example of Paul Gauguin who titled a painting “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?”  Characteristically, however, he is less specific in his title and leaves it up to us to ask the questions or, simply, to contemplate.

Z.Z. sits and looks, and he paints what touches him.  He paints, as Benton said “what was ‘there’,”  unromanticized, studies in form and color, and evocations of an undefined universal truth.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson – a favorite of the Hudson River Painters – wrote in one of his essays, “Historically viewed, it has been the office of art to educate the perception of beauty. We are immersed in beauty, but our eyes have no clear vision.”

Z.Z. Wei’s paintings cause us to look and to look again.  He encourages us to learn about seeing – to have clear vision.