28 June 03
The Painting of Place
I went yesterday to the Philadelphia Museum of Art to look for some paintings by Ellen Ahrens, a cousin of mine and a student of Eakins’. I failed to find them and was about to leave grumpily when I stumbled into an exhibition of the work of Warren Rohrer.
Here is an artist whose sense of place-concretely Christiana, a Mennonite town in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania-informed all his work. His paintings are abstract renditions of light on farmland, whether the hazy heat of June (of which I had first-hand experience) or the still, breathtaking cold light on snow-covered cornfields. Regular patterns across the square canvasses echo the regular lines of ploughed furrows or falling shadows, and the textures in the paint echo husks of corn and rustling hay, waiting to be cut.
Meditative like Rothko or the Amish and Mennonite quilts he grew up around, Rohrer is also playful, particularly with regard to the titles of his paintings (Christiana Boogie Woogie, for instance, shows a very light pink motif overlaying in a subtle way the riotous Mondrian strips beneath it).
It was his very late work that excited me most; Rohrer developed over the years a calligraphic dance from forms he saw in the Pennsylvania fields, and started inserting it into his landscapes in the 1990s.
I love the metaphor: that landscape has its own language. I think of landscapes I know in a more intimate way and try to imagine their calligraphies: what would a levee say if it could speak? I have no doubt about the colors, though, now that I’m back in Davis: ultramarine, yellow ochre, and burnt sienna. It’s hot. I’m home.
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On self and place: yeah (pardon the cliche), wherever you go, there you are. But we are who we are at least partly in response to where we are, is what *I* think. In this evidently endless “difficult time” in my life, I want to go back-
to being who I was in Berkeley, then in Cambridge. I came to the desert looking for the Me I was, here, decades ago. She’s gone. And there’s no going back-I KNOW that, of course, but something in me keeps trying. I liked her so much better, and so did a lot of other people.I’d like to paint the desert the way Rohrer did his farmland. (I googled him, saw a few pieces; gaspworthy!) And your comments stand on their own, elegantly.
You ask an intriguing question: what landscapes speak. I’ll give it some thought next time I’m looking at Tomales Bay, or more interestingly, when I’m swimming through it.
Thanks for the introduction to Rohrer.