To Land, By Sea

Alex Cohen, Chamomile

Francis Cook Gallery is pleased to present To Land, By Sea, a group exhibition on Great Diamond Island in Portland, Maine, featuring work by Tali Burry-Schnepp, Stacy Caldwell, Alex Cohen, Francis Cook, Holly Dudley, Olivia Hiester, Tucker Love, Liam Murphy Torres, Mark Mulhern, and J.D. Wissler.

The exhibition takes its title from the physical experience of reaching the show's venue (the island is accessible only by ferry) and doubles as a literal description of motifs: landscapes and seascapes abound in a show that celebrates the role of nature in artistic creation. But the phrase also suggests something more profound about exploration, navigation, and a journey through the unknown. It's an apt metaphor for the creative process. The artists on view take nature not as a fixed subject but as something to be absorbed and transformed. The resulting pictures are not postcards, but evidence of encounters.

J.D. Wissler's plein air oil paintings and ink drawings were made on-site in Maine, in direct conversation with sea, sky, and shore. Frequently revisiting the same stretch of coastline on Cranberry Island, he always depicted it as if for the first time, freshly experienced in an instant of visual contact. He emerged with portraits of a specific encounter, records of his lived experience. In "Realms and Islands Were Props from His Pockets," a small painting on paper, one can feel the crisp sea breeze and the ocean spray, and hear the water crashing on the rocks below. A viewer is transported to the place and time where Wissler made the painting. However, the work also emphasizes its materiality: one can see the paint itself, confidently applied, and places where the tan ground of the paper substrate shows through. Whatever else it may be, this remains a painting. In this, there is something of the Christian idea of transubstantiation at play; the paint transforms into waves, rocks, and sky, yet it remains paint all the same.

That same respect for paint links Wissler to Liam Murphy-Torres. His practice typically addresses contemporary urban life, but here he contributes two intimate landscapes made during a summer residency in Mount Gretna, Pennsylvania. They are simple, quiet paintings. We see a city dweller taking a moment to let nature in. Despite the shift in subject, this work stays true to his painterly language: his brush moves quickly and almost recklessly, but the paintings are then scraped, sanded, and reworked extensively. The surface holds the record of revision.

Stacy Caldwell's paintings also depict rural Pennsylvania, but unlike Murphy-Torres, she is not a visitor. These are paintings of home: familiar places observed with the clarity that comes from long acquaintance. Complex landscapes have been distilled into just a few characteristic shapes. Whether representing a dog, a house, or a tree, the shapes are animated and dynamic. Working in conversation with painters like Giorgio Morandi and Albert Pinkham Ryder, simple landscapes are elevated by the quality of their shape life.

A drawing by Mark Mulhern echoes Caldwell's tenderness. Layered, expressive marks develop into a carefully considered atmosphere. Figures, dogs, fragments of text come into view, then recede. In some oblique way reminiscent of Leonardo's tempest drawings, the marks themselves animate the image, creating a rhythm for the eye before yielding to their subjects. Holly Dudley's By The River offers the natural world, rigorously painted, as both a sanctuary and a stage. The figure in the foreground sits in solitude, but the landscape holds her. In Olivia Hiester's small wood relief carving, the external world falls away. Only a figure and a pomegranate remain. But one imagines that the frieze of trees that appears behind Dudley's figure has supplied the substrate for Hiester's: the forests depicted in paintings throughout the show provide the found piece of wood that the carving is made from. Hiester respects that wood, producing an image that is as much made with the grain as by the gouge.

The gouge makes another appearance, albeit with a layer of remove, in the woodcuts of Tali Burry-Schnepp. In her woodcuts, the drawing has a certain crude eloquence, the product of a highly sophisticated eye and hand working within the demanding material constraints of the process. Complex scenes are rendered economically, and in the process of transformation take on new richness. Likewise in Burry-Schnepp's tapestries. Flat, graphic images delineated by straight lines emphasize construction over depiction. But in the paintings, an immediate way of working results in a different kind of lyricism and fluidity.

Also flattening her subject, Cook transforms a scene of beachgoers into a diamond, privileging geometry and the movement of the eye over rendering, and creating a light, playful, yet rigorous image.

Similar in motif but tonally opposite, Tucker Love's coastlines abandon mimesis for symbol and sign. In Lucy's Boat, an archetypal pirate ship is moored on a bare beach, flatly delineated on the picture plane. But without any of the conventions of linear perspective or tonal rendering, the color creates a psychological reality: unstable, dream-like, charged with a strange inner weather.

Paintings by Alex Cohen also exist in this other world, an imaginal dimension at once deeply unreal and completely convincing. As a painter, Cohen functions as both midwife and shaman. It becomes evident that the paintings themselves lead the way, and Cohen follows. He is there to support the paintings in their coming into being, not to dictate a preconceived result. It is somewhere in the process of becoming that they acquire their strange magic. Work on view ranges from the familiar to the uncanny and even the grotesque, without ever feeling disjointed or disparate. They occupy the space of dreams. They remind us of painting's miraculous capacity—its ability to make a mythology out of the mundane.

Taken together, the artists in To Land, By Sea offer a wide-ranging but deeply felt set of responses to the natural world. What unites them is not a shared style or subject, but a common kind of attention. In Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust wrote that "The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes…" This is the voyage, the trip by sea that the exhibition offers. It is in the hope of new eyes that these artists paint, and it is in that same hope that one boards a ferry in Portland and visits Great Diamond Island.

Directions

Great Diamond Island is accessible via Casco Bay Lines Ferry, departing from Portland, ME. Book ferry tickets to Diamond Cove, which will be your final destination. After the 30 minute ferry ride the gallery is a 2 minute walk directly up the road from the dock

We look forward to seeing you on the Island!