“We are all the subjects of impressions, and some of us seek to convey the impressions to others. In the art of communicating impressions lies the power of generalizing without losing the logical connection of parts to the whole which satisfies the mind.”
George Inness

The first time I really noticed a painting by George Inness was in the Butler Art Gallery in Youngstown, Ohio. The Butler has a very good collection of American Art, and I was busy looking at some Hudson River landscapes when I turned and looked straight at it. I wasn't quite sure what drew me to it at first, it was kind of blurry, sort of like a dream I guess, or maybe more like a memory. The landscapes in the other room tried to capture the grand details of nature, sometimes untouched by humans. Here, in the foggy outline of a tree, there was clearly human communication.

An early Inness work, Lackawanna Valley (National Gallery), shows a clear departure from the Hudson River painters. It shows some trees that have fallen to human activity, a steam train and a boy sitting hillside looking yonder. It might be more in line with Currier and Ives, or akin to Norman Rockwell. I'm not sure if it communicated any sort of harmony with nature. nature is something that exists on the same level as the boy, the tree stump and the train.

On the surface this painting doesn't have much in common with his later works, yet the idea that many parts make a one. The natural world, and the human world, and perhaps even the industrial world, are inseparable.

Inness lived and painted in Montclair, New Jersey from 1885 to 1894. Today the Montclair Art Museum has 24 of of his works, about half of which are not on display. Of those on display, five are exceptional. One is of the same era as the one in the National Gallery, another Inness considered his finest work.

When you enter the Inness Gallery at the Museum, the words "Knowledge must bow to spirit" is written above the doorway. If you turn around it's also above the doorway from which you entered. Inness believed "the true end of art is not to imitate a fixed material condition, but to represent a living motion." Life in art is a "subtle essence of a moving spirit. This is what satisfies the craving of the intellect, not the excesses of our senses."

I couldn't help but compare his work to Jasper Cropsey, who I learned today was an architect before painting full-time. Crospey's work is engaging on one level, but the strict attention to detail somehow doesn't travel far from the realm of a pictorial representation. An Inness painting not only speaks, but pulls you in and makes you one with it.

The Hudson River School started with Thomas Cole, and some say ended with George Inness. It's an interesting observation that while both Cole and Inness incorporate figures, most Hudson River works showed nature absent of human presence. It's also curious that many of Cole's figures were allegorical, and in works by Inness, the figures are not only hard to separate from the landscape, it's hard to tell if their presence is physical or spiritual. One painting today showed the figure of a woman. It seemed that figure was no more than a light imprint on the landscape. Like the way a human spends 75 or so years on the earth, then leaves, but much of their being remains, in the impact they had on the world, and in the minds of others.

The painting that, according to a label at the museum, Inness considered his best work is Early Autumn, Montclair. It is striking. The vibrant intense colors make it seem full of life. Yet a dark cloud hovers above. Nothing in the painting seems young. The tree is old, the barn withered and the red color of the tree in the center indicates winter is coming. Yet it's more stunning than it has been all year. It came to my mind that the mental and creative climax of life comes near the end. It would seem that way for George Inness.

The painting I most wanted to see was Christmas Eve. The night before I described the painting as "being cold and warm at the same time." It could be the figure in the painting is undergoing some sort of religious transformation, but from my own memory one of the best aspects of Christmas is the absolute quiet late at night. It may be cold, but there's peace, or at least the possibility of it in our hearts.

Every once in a while you look at a painting and recognize similarities, in feeling if not structure. Sometimes these similarities are obvious, and sometimes they are not so obvious.

A obvious example, or what seemed obvious to me anyway, was a painting in the Butler Museum of American Art. William Gropper's "The Youngstown Strike" reminded me of Picasso's "Guernica." It would seem this similarity may have been intentional as Gropper related the events.

"The Youngstown Strike" is one of the most gripping social protest works of the period. The painting was apparently prompted by the extended strikes staged in 1936-37 by workers at the Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company, Youngstown, Ohio. During these years chaos frequently reigned throughout much of the city. In one incident, following a savage confrontation with police guards by workers and their families, the police tear gassed and shot at the workers; two strikers were killed and twenty-eight injured. The positioning of figures in Gropper's painting make anything other than an intentional similarity unlikely.

If you didn't pick up on it yet, random events come up randomly and sometimes songs sound similar even when the writers are unfamiliar with another's work. The problem with my theory is Guernica and the Youngstown Strike were painted in the same year. Instead of one work being based on another, the similarities were the result of a zeitgeist gripping the age.

Picasso's painting of course shows the horrors of war, and for what at first may seem like an odd parallel has even been compared to Davinci's "The Last Supper." Guernica depicts the Nazi German bombing of Guernica, Spain, by twenty-eight bombers, on April 26, 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. The attack killed between 250 and 1,600 people, and many more were injured. (While living in Nazi-occupied Paris during World War II, Picasso suffered harassment from the Gestapo. One officer allegedly asked him, upon seeing a photo of Guernica in his apartment, "Did you do that?" Picasso responded, "No, you did.") While the Youngstown Strike event happened in 1916, Gropper painted it in the depths of the Great Depression in 1937.

Guernica was initially exhibited in July 1937 at the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris International Exposition. Perhaps he saw Guernica in a magazine, but it doesn't appear Gropper was in Paris. In 1937 he was in the American West witnessing the dust bowl.

Another example of similarities in paintings may be a bit more of a stretch. At the Westmoreland Museum of Art show on John Sloan, his painting "Election Night" somehow brought to mind Renoir's "Luncheon of the Boating Party." Its not so much Sloan's dark painting of gritty New York that recalled Renoir's colorful work, but they way the characters interact-or avoid meaningful interaction. Each painting has a general good humor about it and yet to each individual character it doesn't seem to matter whether another is there. Renoir's work is slightly different in that some characters are interested in others, only that other has a mind somewhere else.

Many of the Sloan works are from the Delaware Art Museum and are currently on display at the Westmoreland. The Youngstown Strike is permanently at the Butler.

Even though Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin has used pastel extensively back in 18th century, the Pastel Society of America was only founded a little more than 30 years ago. (After the death of Mary Cassatt and William Merritt Chase, the pastel as a painting medium almost died.)

The opinion that only oil paintings are worth displaying still prevails. Even though pastel works does not need as much attentive preservation as other formats of works on paper such as watercolor or charcoal, there are far less popular in the market or in the museums. Carnegie Museum of Art does not have any pastel works on display while the permanent collection on display at the Butler Museum of American Art contains only one pastel work (by Mary Cassatt). The only exception would be Met probably because they have too many works and much more space.

The show which takes up one big room in the museum is a manifestation of how flexible pastel can be. Among them there are a photo-realism depiction of an alley in sunset by Brian Cobble, Daniel Greene’s full size incisive study of Robert Beverly Hale and Rae Smith’s impressionistic fogging scene.

The study of Robert Beverly Hale by Daniel Greene is magnificent. Simply it is the homage made by one of the most influential portrait artists to the one of the most foremost figure drawing teachers, also the best demonstration of the principles of chiaroscuro and observation from life. The contrast between warm and cool, light and shadow recedes behind an overall impression of an aged man of dignity and wisdom. But a close look of the techniques shows that every stroke is a tour de force of Mr. Greene’s confidence and mastery skills. The final version of the pastel painting has a more meditative feeling because Greene lowed down Mr. Hale’s eyes as if he is brooding and muted the yellowish background with more peaceful green .

If Greene’s work shows that pastel portrait can be as much effective as oil one, Sam Goodsell’s “Threshold” makes sure that everyone realize pastel can make a different portrait from oil medium. The surface of the paper shows through the lightly-covered layers of pastel its own neutral color in both human figure and the background, thus harmonizing the whole picture. Strokes are visibly light and relaxed, yet the natural spontaneity was built on solid form and great composition. Unlike a lot of pastel works I have seen, the palette has only a few limited colors; but they are just as efficient as the huge variety of colors that were used by Greene.

Rae Smith’s Morning Mist #7 is Eric’s favorite of all paintings in the exhibition. The pink purple color that dominates the fog scene is so unconventional yet totally convincing. The suggestive rising sunlight and the mystic depth of wood drew one into the scene.

Brian Cobble’s photo-realistic “Lexington Alley” portrays a sense of uneasiness under the wholesome, somewhat nostalgia sunset light. But a very close examination (which set the alarm on several times) showed that it is not a painting of hygiene touches. Mr. Cobble has put numerous tiny lines of different colors on top of each big color patch, almost like pointillism except the fact they are so light that optically they are submerged into the original color. In some way, he reminds me works by Edward Hopper with the same kind of loneness looming out of balanced geometric suburban setting. It is not the void of human figures in a picture full of evidence of human traces that stirred my feelings, it is the incongruity between austere harsh lines of geometric architecture and the rampant natural grasses which reclaim their territory in the suburban land that made me wonder: As people move out of the center cities, have they got closer to the nature?

The show will continue until Feb 29, 2008.

As I was walking through a painting gallery over the weekend, a friend asked me if I had a favorite artist. It's not a question that brings an easy answer. It would be almost as hard for me to tell you my favorite color, though I may come up with one. I don't generally see the world in this way. I think there are so many elements in the world, so many paintings, so much music, so many colors that they come and go each making some impact on us and then fading away or becoming a more significant bulding block in who we are and the way we see things. Sometimes the way we see things at first leaves one impression and then with further contemplation, something completely different. The perception can change with time. The immediate perception itself doesn't change, however. What changes is our perception of the immediate perception. Our perception morphs from that immediate perception into something else, a perception that includes that immediate impression and everything we've thought about it since and what together it means to us at any given moment.

So I have described the immediate perception, and at any moment the current perception. A third element to our impression of a painting is our memory of that perception, which can vary from an immediate perception as much as any memory can vary from the actual event. What we think about the immediate perception differs from a memory in that we are not necessarily thinking about a memory.

I wasn't thinking about this all at once when I, after a few moments of pause, gave my answer of George Inness. Yet in pondering my answer, I think this is what I like most about Inness-- that sense of an immediate impression, perception or perhaps the most accurate word would be feeling. To me, many of the works by Inness provide this sense of how we feel about something the first time we see it. Not the thing itself, but that feeling of what it is that we get even before we look at it completely. As soon as we look at it completetely we destroy it. Its almost as if we have to be walking one way, turn our head quickly, breathe in and then shut our eyes. We let the world with a breathe in and then hold it in our breasts to be forever not what it is, but what it is to us. That's George Inness.


The other type of Inness painting I think is the ones that seem to depict memory, and sometimes a memory of that first feeling we had when we set our sites on a place in time. The specifics don't matter the way they seem to in a Dali, in fact if they are there in our memories, they aren't what they were physically anyway. It's our minds that can see the world somewhat, but not entirely independent of what exists. It's our memories that keep it in existence long after that fleeting moment in time has passed.

These feelings, first impressions and the memories of them would have been lost to eternity had they not been painted by Inness. More, they seem to let us inside Inness himself and enter our phsyche almost as if it was an impression on our mind or a memory therein.

Inness himself may have recognized the changing nature of impressions and images in our minds. As an image enters our mind covering over or somehow changing another memory or idea, so Inness enjoyed most painting not on a blank canvas, but on other work. He is also said to have never considered a painting finished and always reserved the right to rework it even after it had sold, almost as if the paintings were a recording of his changing idea of an impression on canvas.

So my answer for now is George Inness.

Images: Close up from work at Toledo Museum of Art (top) Close up from work at Buteler Museum of American Art (bottom)