The Transforming
All art is about transition. Landscapes are ever changing, even without people. Time flows and human life streams with it. It’s a steady, almost unnoticed accelerating rate of change. An artist is aware of the flow and understands that the appearance of something is almost arbitrary—that life is really an idea born of a moment.
The Englishman John Constable could make a boat float, a horse solid and stoic, or render trees and shrubs in ways that would delight a botanist. But his greatness lies in his depiction of the power of life. He captures a world that’s changing quickly even as it seems to linger sanguinely. You witness this through the complexity of composition and dramatic lights and darks. He captures a moment in time with the convergence of biology and man in a certain temporary balance.
His people fit comfortably in nature even as they alter it with locks, dams, bridges, buildings, farms and roads. Their comfortable world is slipping away faster than they can understand.
That is Constable’s moral. He constructs the scene, not as it might have actually looked, but in a way to tell his story.
Barbara Nuss tells stories of America. These are also tales of time. Her original sketches of the farm did not include horses. She added them…and then moved them around. In the final painting, a horse looks right at us. Maybe he's talking to us. It captures not only our eye but a feeling…a feeling of something lost? An era that has passed us by? The scene draws us in, in different ways, but it captures us all. And it ties us to the painter, to Barbara Nuss, in a very personal way.
Andrei Kushnir also paints a timeless scene. But it is actually of a time not long past. The C&O Canal and its bridge were born during a period of dynamic evolution. The people of the world were arriving in the US in mass and pushing westward so fast that this slash through the natural world now seems antiquated. It induces romantic sentimentality. For me, the meaning is sharper as I could once run forever on the towpath along the canal.
Can change in itself be trauma—wrapping together all of the other traumas of a life experienced? Why then can looking at a scene of the past bring a sense of calm? Maybe it is a yearning to go back to the beginning—before PTSD—before the upheavals and threats of a world teetering on the edge of control. That calm is the magic of art. We need it now more than ever.
1. "The White Horse" - John Constable - detail
2. “Jon’s Farm” - Barbara Nuss - www.barbaranuss.com
3. "Autumn" - Andrei Kushnir - andreikushnir.com