Maurice Prendergast – Two Women Crossing a Field

“I shall not speak, I shall think about nothing”

Maurice Prendergast, Large Boston Public Garden Sketchbook – Two women crossing a field, 1895-97, watercolour

Two ladies in white dresses are walking through a yellow field. With their dainty parasols and elegant hats they almost look like porcelain dolls. The scene is closely cropped and we don’t get to see much of the nature around them. We don’t even see the sky the way we do in similar paintings by Claude Monet. Instead of a detailed portrayal of clouds and grass, Prendergast focuses on the intense yellowness of the field and offers us a sketchy but joyous scene in nature. The summer’s ripeness and vibrancy are at their peak. The lady’s red sash is dancing in the wind and its vibrant red colour contrasts beautifully with the yellow and white. Prendergast wonderfully masters the colour scheme where each colour brings out the vibrancy of the other. All of Prendergast’s watercolours have an uplifting effect on me and I really love how he wasn’t shy about using all the rich shades of colours. His love of raw, bright colours and flatness comes from his years of working in commercial arts. The watercolour sketches in the Boston sketchbook were all made after his return from Paris where he was introduced to the art of Aubrey Beardsley, Edouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard, but despite all these influences Prendergast returned to America with a vision of art that was playful, childlike, vibrant and completely his own. He took the Impressionist motives of leisure and nature but decided to portray them in the medium of watercolours instead of the traditional oil on canvas. This particular sunny, summery watercolour has been on my mind for a long time now and I thought what better time to write about this lovely watercolour than in the warm, yellow month of July? To end, here is a very fitting poem by Arthur Rimbaud called “Sensation”:

“On the blue summer evenings, I shall go down the paths,
Getting pricked by the corn, crushing the short grass:
In a dream I shall feel its coolness on my feet.
I shall let the wind bathe my bare head.

I shall not speak, I shall think about nothing:
But endless love will mount in my soul;
And I shall travel far, very far, like a gipsy,
Through the countryside – as happy as if I were with a woman.”

Karl Nordström – Field of Oats

“Summer’s lease hath all too short a date.“

(Shakespeare, Sonnet 18)

Karl Nordström, Field of Oats at Grez-sur-Loing, 1885

Something about this landscape by a Swedish Impressionist painter speaks to my soul. A field of oats is a seemingly simple, almost humble motif, but this landscape has a poetic and gentle beauty which speaks of deeper feelings. I love the vastness of the field, painted in soft shades of green and yellow, and the way nearly the entire canvas is the field itself; it makes me feel as if I am a part of the oat field, in their embrace. Nordström beautifully captures the oats that have soaked in all the summer sun and are now ripe and ready to be harvested. Touches of vibrant blue and red add a playful touch to the gentle greenness. It is pleasant to think of blue cornflowers and crimson poppies growing among the oats and enjoying the sunny, carefree, summer days. Larks are flying in the upper right corner and a small figure of a reaper with his scythe appears to be harvesting the oats; how tiny he is compared to the vastness of the field and nature.

Nordström painted this oat field in a commune Grez-sur-Loing in north-central France which was a popular hot spot fir many artists at the time; Nordström met his wife Tekla Lindeström, who was an engraver, there and a fellow Swedish Carl Larsson also met his future wife there. Even though this painting precedes Vincent van Gogh’s painting “The Sower” (1888) by three years, I see it as a sort of closer to Van Gogh’s painting where a farmer, with a rising bright and shining yellow sun in the background, is planting the seeds and in this painting they are ripe and ready to be harvested. In Nordström’s painting, the farmer’s scythe is almost symbolic of death, for the summer is nearing its end and very soon the very fields where the oats grew and danced in the wind will be nothing but a vast muddy nothingness, only a few broken stems will rise from the autumnal mists. These days my thoughts are tinged with sadness; one more summer is passing and I know that once gone, it will seem like a distant dream. I know that, in winter dreariness, I shall scarcely be able to imagine the sun’s warm touch on my skin. I feel like I spend a thousand years waiting, yearning, craving summer, only to enjoy it for a second until it quickly vanishes. Persephone must feel the same way, sighing longingly, as she descends again to the darkness of the underworld…

Lermontov – Happiness is…. being in a cornfield

Autumn is passing, never to return… at least not this year, and December’s cold fingers are touching the landscape, transforming the fields of corn and wheat which shone in gold to desolate spaces where silence resides, save for the moments when the crows hold ominous yet chatty meetings. Today, this little poem by the Russian Romantic poet Mikhail Lermontov, called “When, in the cornfield” is on my mind. It was written in 1837, when the poet was in his twenty-third year and is an example of a Romantic poet’s love of nature, which seems to be the only place a Byronic hero such as Lermontov can find joy and calmness which people and society do not offer. I don’t think one necessarily has to visit a corn field and walk about it seeking joy, but really any place in nature will surely evoke such sweet, serene feelings. Life seems easier when we see how effortless and slow everything is in nature, yet everything is accomplished. “Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.” (Lao Tzu) If nature can take things slow and be beautiful in every season, so can we, be it sadness or joy, flowers or snow….

“My heart is losing troubles and distress  —

And I can apprehend the happiness on earth…”

George Clausen (1852-1944) View of a lady in Pink standing in a cornfield, 1881

When, in the Cornfield…

When, in the cornfield, yellow waves are rising,

The wood is rustling at the sound of soft wind,

And, in the garden, crimson plums are hiding

In pleasant shade of leaves, so shining ones and green;

 

When, spilled with fragrant dew in calmness of the alley,

In morning of a gold or evening of a red,

Under the bush, the lily of a valley,

Is gladly nodding me with silver of her head;

 

When the icy brook in the ravine is playing,

And, sinking thoughts in somewhat misty dreams,

In bubbling tones secretly tale-telling

Of those peaceful lands from which it gaily streams  —

 

Then wrinkles are smoothing on my knitted brow,

My heart is losing troubles and distress  —

And I can apprehend the happiness on earth,

And see Almighty in the heavens now…

Picture found here.

Picture by Julia Starr.

Andrea Kowch – Magic Realism of the Countryside

Last autumn I discovered the prodigious world that Andrea Kowch has created on her canvases and I was instantly captivated by the atmosphere of dreams and intrigues; in her paintings the desolation of the vast fields and weary old barns becomes intriguing and everyday domesticity is transformed into something spectacular.

Knolls Edge

An extremely prolific, imaginative and skilled contemporary painter, Andrea Kowch, was born in Detroit in 1986. She loves fairy tales and uses her daydreams as springboards for her paintings. Also, the band she often listens to whilst painting is Depeche Mode.

You will notice from the paintings I’ve assembled in this post that countryside is a motif which pervades her art; American countryside to be more precise. These canvases are filled with dreamy meadows littered with silver dandelions, golden fields of barley, corn and wheat, barns with paint flaking off, wooden cottages, murky brooks with dark waters, strange old trees, blades of grass swayed by a mysterious wind, roosters, ravens and turkeys. Another recurring motif is a wistful pale-faced woman, often with messy red hair, dressed in an unusual old-fashioned dress. You will also notice a distinctly autumnal colour palette of deep, warm and cozy shades of orange, purple, red, olive green, browns and yellows. Kowch uses these colours to further convey that mood. And also because of other things as well, as she says herself:

“Autumn is my favorite season. The scents in the air, changing landscapes, colors, mood of the sky, air of ominous foreshadowing… It’s when the earth begins to truly bare its soul. It’s when I can feel the bones, core, and essence of nature. There is also a cozy and mysterious quality that inspires me to turn inward and relish solitude and explore deeper feelings. The heavy, rolling clouds spark moods in me which translate into the work. A beautiful sense of melancholy and nostalgia permeates everything as the natural world prepares to surrender itself over to winter. All of those things are very poignant, and speak to my soul in many profound ways.” (read her entire interview here)

Perhaps the women appear languid, lost in thoughts or dreams, but the turkey’s disdainful face expression with squinted eyes speaks volumes about what is going on in the scene….

Though repetitive in her use of motifs, Kowch succeeded in creating a world that is realistic at first sight, and very strange and fanciful at the same time. She beautifully illustrated the working of her imagination and opened the doors of her inner world for us viewers. Kowch’s visions of the countryside are undoubtedly very dreamy, but they are a bit eerie as well, there is something strangely silent in them, the fanciful wind is blowing out of nowhere, the women often appear frozen in the moment, not very convincing in the activity they are doing, such as catching butterflies, eating or dancing; though their mortal bodies are there in that space, their thoughts are elsewhere. Whether the setting is a field or a kitchen, a strangeness hangs above the wistful, mysterious figures like a cloud.

…and making pies with forest fruit was never so fun. And look at that crow leaving a print of her tiny feet on the dough, adorable!

Though very peculiar and dreamy at first sight, endowed with a distinct aesthetic, Kowch’s paintings reveal some influences from the art history as well, mainly the Northern Renaissance and the art of Andrew Wyeth. Both Kowch and Wyeth have a similar way of portraying the countryside and people in it, but Kowch is stylistically more vivid in colours whereas Wyeth uses a minimalist toned-down colour palette of grey, white, brown and green. Kowch’s paintings are richer with details that charm the eye, they are more illustrative, resembling scenes of fairy tales rather than desolate state of the soul. The season that fuels her art is autumn, and Wyeth also favours autumn and winter and the way nature is in that time of the year: “I prefer winter and fall, when you can feel the bone structure in the landscape—the loneliness of it—the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it—the whole story doesn’t show.” Grass in Kowch’s paintings bears a similarity to the very detailed grass in Wyeth’s painting “Christine’s World”, and the flimsy curtains dancing in the wind are also a shared motif. Her attention to detail when it comes to portraying scenes from nature, such as the grass in the painting “Knolls Edge”, also reminds me of the very precise way Botticelli painted the background and the grass in his famous painting “Primavera“.

Kowch uses her friends as models for the paintings. The face expressions of these strange and mad women are also very peculiar; they appear troubled, sad, wistful, their pale oval faces laced with yearning and nostalgia. They walk the meadows with wild determination, in silence, only the blades of grass sing sweet songs, they make pies with ravens, sit at the table uninterested in food, or gaze in the void. They seem mute, but with a lot of hidden drama and secrets inside.

Two somnambulists treading their way through the meadow in a misty autumn morning, the birds are curious observers.

There is a constant battle between realistic and surreal, dreamy, scarcely believable elements in Kowch’s paintings. Motifs she uses; women, fields and barns are all very realistic and not unusual at all to our eyes. Her painting technique is detailed, precise and accurate, which further leads our eyes to believe that what she is presenting is real. Still, the final result is all but “realism” in any term of the word. The best way to describe her art would then be: magic realism. Also, her method of portraying the boring and plain everyday reality and presenting it as something strange and whimsical reminds me of a term called “defamiliarization” (“ostranienie” in Russian), used in theoretical discussions of literature, originally coined by Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky in his essay “Art as Device”. It’s making things strange in order to intrigue the reader, or here, the viewer. In my view, this is exactly what Kowch is doing to us: she is making us see the otherwise laughably boring and normal scenes is a strange exciting way.

Her paintings definitely leave the viewer with a sense of vagueness, for, what are they really? Scenes from dreams, everyday life seen through rose-tinted glasses, an topsy-turvy world of Alice in Wonderland: the American version, frozen moments in secret tales known only to her…

Grasshoppers even on her hat, now, this is called crossing boundaries!

Rural sisters

Whirlwind

These roosters are madly adorable; little, angry and with great hairstyles! 😉

What is she running away from, what secrets does the barn withhold from us?

And here is our sombre grown-up Alice in Pumpkinland. Gorgeous colours and so much feelings in that landscape.

Shattered hopes, or just painful memories revisited?