Landscapes show at Guild Hall is about Long Island light and a lot more

While at first glance the current exhibition at Guild Hall in East Hampton would seem to be yet another seasonal paean to the vaunted and storied light of the East End, the show’s impact, thankfully, goes well beyond this fatuous and questionable characterization (a claim that can be—and is—made regularly by any number of artists in countless locales around the globe).

This isn’t to say that there is anything limiting about the light out here, but rather that its rare qualities, in terms of the stimulation that artists receive from it, are more often than not an illusion suitable more for press releases than for a rational analysis of the artists’ works. As the master photographer W. Eugene Smith once noted, “available light is any damn light that is available.”

At the same time, one cannot deny that the works by April Gornik, Jane Wilson, and Jane Freilicher are, as the title of the show suggests, “Inspired by the Light.” It is an inspiration, though, that arises from an understanding of illumination as an artistic construction within a painting rather than a product of the ambient environment around the artist at the moment of creation.

This is particularly apparent in the landscapes of Jane Wilson, which, while marginally reminiscent of Long Island vistas, can only be solely credited as such by those who have never seen the countryside of her Midwest origins. As was noted in her 2001 exhibition at the Heckscher Museum in Huntington: “While each work may bear a title allusive of the East End, these landscapes, with their low horizon lines, expanses of water, and depicting nature in microcosm, are universal enough to have been from almost anywhere.”

This universality is accomplished through Ms. Wilson’s ability to conjure illumination that is derived more from changing meteorological conditions than directly from the presence of the sun. As a result, the paintings are significantly less about the landscape itself, and more about nature and the natural world as a constantly changing visual experience that can be, by turns, either bucolic and restful or dramatic and turbulent.

In “Sun and Rain” (oil on linen, 2004), for example, the gentle rolling hills of the landscape are very much a secondary component, dwarfed by the bands of bright clouds that dominate the upper register, leading the eye into a temperate and endless vista that seems to stretch on into eternity.

“Electric Midnight” (oil on canvas, 2005), on the other hand, uses a powerful combination of colors to re-create an impressively striking sense of atmosphere and stately motion. Offering the presence of illumination through a thin band of light blue caressing the edges of a dark bank of clouds, this piece illustrates Hans Hoffman’s observation that “in nature, light creates the color while in the picture, color creates the light.”

This sense of drama is also an important component in April Gornik’s panoramas, although her works bear more of a resemblance to the allegorical landscapes of the late 1800s, offering what amount to imaginary scenes that are fraught with subtle symbolic meaning rather than representations of any particular place.

This effect is particularly apparent in “Sun, Storm, and Sea” (oil on linen, 2005), in which the light glinting off the storm tossed water creates a measure of grandiosity and limitless scale, offering the viewer less the sensation of looking through a window at a removed scene than a sense that the artist has replicated the actual visual experience itself.

Further, the illumination on the water also serves as a pictorial tool, pulling the eye deep into the work and accentuating the juxtaposition of the sun drenched clouds to the left and the bank of ominous storm clouds that occupy the middle ground of the work.

In “Field and Storm” (oil on linen, 2003), by contrast, Ms. Gornik allows a path through a wind tossed field to unite the various compositional elements, while her use of color and brush strokes emphasizes a degree of portent that is simultaneously meteorologically menacing and yet strangely serene.

While both Ms. Wilson and Ms. Gornik use light as a component to accentuate and emphasize aspects within the works, Jane Freilicher bathes the entire canvas in it, using color and light almost as a single inseparable element when taken together.

In addition, while the other two artists create images that could be located almost anywhere, Ms. Freilicher’s scenes tend to be extremely evocative of the East End, using a form of gestural realism in which the subject itself appears less important in the compositional framework of the paintings than the process of painting itself.

As a result, while less overtly pictorially dramatic, the paintings nevertheless create narrative motifs that seem as wedded to abstraction as realism, the contrasts in foreground and background firmly delineated without either one dominating the picture plane.

“The Mallow Gatherers” (oil on linen, 1958), for example, uses expressionistic brush strokes that alternate between active verticals in the foreground and a more gentle sweep of lines and colors in the distance, each tied together by both the trees in the left quadrant of the canvas and the refreshingly empty negative space to the right.

The exhibition “Inspired by the Light” continues at Guild Hall in East Hampton through July 27.