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The last small-scale work before the climatic Aegis is Wind Collector (2017). The black trunk of a leafless tree, its roots having dissolved, is suspended in a field of blue whose circulating currents dematerialize the remaining branches into gray smears and sprites of yellow. The wind takes on its own life, like the Greek Anemoi but without any humanistic anthropomorphism. If anything, the title suggests the human vanity of trying to control nature.
Finally, turning around, viewers process across the room, passing through the natural light entering the gallery windows, toward the towering 94 × 57-inch canvas Aegis (2019) as if approaching a throne. Up until this point in the exhibition, the viewers had projected themselves in the 4 × 6-inch painted worlds, such as Quiver, and imagined being immersed in them, but now the distance to safely observe the sublime collapses as the painting’s scale rivals the beholders’ and nature’s agency triumphs. Below, an enchanted pool of blue-green light surrounded by marshy, muddy forms invites them to enter through the picture plane, but it is also an abyss. However, stepping into the pond one does not sink, but rises, preternaturally, raptured diagonally across the canvas into a vertical stretch of pale yellow and green ether, while witnessing on the other side of the canvas mysteries veiled in brooding clouds. At the top of the canvas, feathery white streaks and dark cool splotches of paint coalesce into a monument in a state of dissolution. A dramatic conclusion, Aegis is a final demonstration of the ineffable and formidable forces of nature flowing throughout the exhibition.
- Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Vintage, 1996), pp. 6-7.
ROBERT R. SHANE received his Ph.D. in Art History and Criticism at Stony Brook University and is Associate Professor of Art History at the College of Saint Rose, Albany, NY.
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