Bonus Prelude: YouTube Rock Art Epic Sensation!

Now, back to work.

Perhaps Spring’s promise of fresh earth and sky is potent serum for new collaborations.   With Daylight Savings Time just days away, Altamira Fine Art announces a rare two-person show, No Limit. The exhibition joins the work of landscape artists John Felsing and Kathryn Mapes Turner. An opening reception takes place Thursday, March 11,  5-7:00 p.m.  

Turner grew up on Grand Teton National Park’s Triangle X Ranch, her family’s homestead.  Felsing has lived in his rural Michigan home twenty years; the artists have been friends for many years.   Strong rooted landscapes are part of humankind’s great collective unconscious and while Turner’s landscapes are traditionally loosely impressionistic, she’s not let go of realism.  That would be difficult to do, growing up in the Valley of the Park, a landscape packed with every imaginable element but the sea.  And understandable, because the urgent impulse to relate this true magnificence in recognizable form is a constant.   But in this show, I see a loosening of that emotional grip;  a loosening that, far from letting go, allows more interpretation of light and form in.   The results may be less specific to geographical place, but not less specific to sense of place.

This may be Felsing’s influence; he has long been encouraging Turner’s painterly explorations.  Felsing’s minimalistic, tonalist palette relates memory of place, Michigan’s more dissolved and meandering open territories.  He describes his work as being adverse to labels, and his paintings are responses to moments.  Viewers of Felsing’s paintings say they often have to step across the room to view his works before realizing their subjects as the paintings, up close, appear abstract.   Felsing thinks of his paintings as anything from portraits, to deductions, to music.

As in Whistler’s nocturnes, there is a meeting of the east–Asian–and Western influences in Felsing’s work.  An essay I found on Whistler’s nocturnes says that for Whistler, “nocturne” is a reference to the tendency of French Romantic painters to relate art to music and a “binary color scheme.”

“I am not interested in reproducing what is visible, but in attempting to make things visible,” says Felsing.  “Not until I visit a place repeatedly, do I feel enough intimacy to attempt a painting; only then does one realize that art grows out of love.”

(This is an active period for Michigan’s “state of mind” in the arts;  playwright Sam Shepard, a long time Michigan resident, is currently enjoying both a successful New York run of a new play and a revival of one of his classics.  His spare, tight stories are almost molecular in their scarce structure and prose.)

Turner, a partner in Trio Fine Art, is taking a spring break with this show, germinating a few new seeds.   She continues to be fully associated with Trio.

No Limit remains on display through March 31.   For information, email Altamira Fine Art at connect@altamiraart.com.