“Well, we know where we’re going. But we don’t know where we’ve been. And we know what we’re knowing. But we can’t say what we’ve seen.”
— Talking Heads
The landscape paintings of Stephen Remick are unequivocally about place. Well, duh.
But landscape painting is not always about place. The landscapes of some his regional colleagues, peers and mentors — many from the long defunct Swain School of Design from which he graduated in 1986 — are a testament to that.
For example, Don Beal’s landscapes are invented mythologies of imagination and memory. Diane Counoyer’s landscapes are all about radiance and ephemerality. And Sig Haines’s uses the landscape as a way to indulge a formalist methodology in order to explore complex color relationships.
But Remick embraces place for its own sake. There is a pure unwavering devotion to the blue highways and green mountains of Vermont, where he was raised, and to the pastures, pond and pump houses of southeastern Massachusetts, where he has resided since the early 1980s.
In “The Journey,” the first one-person art exhibition at the Dartmouth Cultural Center at the Olde Southworth Library, Remick presents a series of works that are exquisitely implemented “captured,” to borrow a term from photography.
His work is emotionally evocative without drifting into overt sentimentality. There is something that is quintessentially New England in a painting like “Blue Door at Alderbrook.” In it, a seemingly dilapidated old truck and a tractor sit in front an outbuilding in a snow-laden field.
Is it possible to feel nostalgia for something one has never experienced firsthand? This painting answers the question in the affirmative.
Remick is a master of the snowscape and a number of them are presented in the exhibition.
“Backyard Snow Angel” features a trail of footprints emerging from a distant forest glen, culminating in that emblematic shape of childhood winters, in which arms are moved about in the snow to emulate the wings of an angel. Lovely pale blue shadows abound.
“Crossing Destruction Brook” is almost a challenge to traverse the two side-by-side snow-covered planks across a black icy stream.
In the bucolic “Allen’s Pond with Tractor,” a John Deere tractor and attached plow sit in front of a great expanse of brilliant green field, duller blue bodies of water and a silver-grey sky. A short length of bright orange vinyl surveyor’s tape is tied from the plow to some point out of the picture plane. It is that kind of bold inclusion of an element most would ignore that elevates Remick’s vision of the common to the extraordinary.
Remick has often forayed into an area bordering on full blown abstraction. And those are are intriguing in their own, in part because he doesn’t not abandon the real, so to speak.
In this exhibition, none of those paintings are exhibited. But in “Meet Me at the Greenhouse,” one can clearly understand Remick’s fascination with the nexus between the narrative of realism and the playfulness of abstraction.
The painting is pure eye candy. A massive array of flowers, lavender and white, take center stage. Behind is the zigzag structure of the window frames in which the glass panes are set. The structure is all geometry and gusto. Beyond the panes is reality intruding: two women, a streetlamp, a distant building.
The highlight of the exhibition “The Journey” is a painting of the same name. A young woman, back to the viewer, her blonde tresses tied up in a bun, is wearing a pink life vest as she sits in the front of a canoe or kayak. Lemon yellow paddles are on either end of her oar.
It is Remick’s daughter Tess, painted from a photograph taken a few weeks before she left for college. Physical journey becomes metaphor.
And for Remick, a place is not just about space. It’s also about time.
“The Journey” is on display at the Dartmouth Cultural Center at the Olde Southworth Library, 404 Elm Street, South Dartmouth through Sept. 9.
Don Wilkinson is a painter and art critic who lives in New Bedford. Contact him at Don.Wilkinson@gmail.com. His reviews run each week in Coastin’.