Let me tell you about a moment I had this weekend in Beverly Hills (it’s my birthday today, so you are going to get a story). I walked into Michael Werner and immediately could see I was in the presence of a non-LA artist. My companion on the evening, Adele Renault, remarked the same thing. The colors, the shapes, the landscapes, the mood, was certainly not LA. It was refreshing. Not that I am tired of LA painters painting the landscape here, but it’s healthy to get a new perspective, some new tones, some new terrain.
I immediately was thinking of Andrew Wyeth, he of Pennsylvania, he of rolling flatlands and rivers. In this gallery, it was Brett Goodroad, he of Kearney, Nebraska who now lives in Paradise Valley, California, but still holding onto a midwestern color scheme that is both beautiful and hazy. The paintings speak of wind and weather, almost as if the air has pushed the oil paint across the canvas. Goodroad (and can there be a better name for someone who paints like this?) paints outdoors, and it’s almost as if he has stolen the color of fall from the land, taken our exact ideal of what an impending winter season looks like, and let the earth direct him. There are hints of figuration, people will show up here, but it’s mostly about blurring the boundaries between paint and land. Entitled Paradise Valley and painted in Surprise Valley, California, you can see the high desert color scape here, too. Goodroad paints on copper, which gives an antique appearance.
Across town at Philip Martin Gallery is Ontario, Canada-based Sky Glabush’s All Night I Heard a Singing Bird, another stunning body of work that is not of this place and intriguing when seen in the California setting. What I have always loved about Glabush’s work is the enormity of it, how it swallows you in painstaking detail. The flowers and fields overwhelm you in their sheer size, the colors of yellows and browns with hints of red and deep midnight blues would pair so well with Goodroad in that where he paints abstraction, Glabush is capturing a cinematic imagination.
What both of these shows do is create a visual language of organic and seasonal growth. Time both stops here and seems to be unbothered by us. Landscape works in California tend to show the sudden shift of perspective, where a valley makes way to the highest peaks, where the ocean meets the redwoods or the desert meats the mountains. In Goodroad and Glabush, it’s more about what you can see across a plain, across a lake, almost staring into the void of color and light and night and seeing what your eyes can make out. A blur of earthly movement occurs, and how can you paint that? —Evan Pricco
