Word: brush
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...part, his assertion of "abstract" readings within a very forthright and apparently realistic transcription of raw nature. Typically, his spaces are shallow and entangled. You are on the forest floor, in a cavern of green and gray, gazing at an almost impenetrable screen of slender tree-trunks, fallen branches, brush, lichens and rocks. There is no horizon line to offer visual release: just more forest, dappled and blotched with light. The surface is not oppressively congested-for at his best, in paintings like Late Light, 1978, or Shadow, 1977, Welliver has a gift for surrounding every shape with air, drenching...
...direct and uncluttered; it seems to have been done alla prima, wet into wet, in a few hours. In fact, it is very considered painting. Welliver's accuracy of tone is phenomenal; there are hardly any "holes" and tonally inert areas in his work. With a loaded, flouncing brush he can put in the blue rim of ice around the cold black water of a pond, or the melting rime on the flank of a snow hummock, so that the substance is as palpable as the gesture...
...land scape work Welliver has an emotional intensity that goes beyond the ordinary limits of realism in painting. Shadow is a stand of birches in snow: strong blue sky peeping through their pale trunks, and more blue scattered in the luminous dark clefts of the snow lying on fallen brush. Just above the middle of the painting, the shadow line of a ridge falls across the trees and the ground. The hill behind you becomes a silent, extraordinary presence: not menacing, not metaphorical, but a sign of what the Middle Ages called natura naturans: nature disclosing itself, going about...
...results of human artifice are one thing, the effects of nature are another. A raccoon's coat is natural, a raccoon coat is not. Hair grows naturally on the human head, but its naturalness vanishes the instant it is groomed with comb, brush, scissors or curlers. The term natural, in its strictest sense, should not be applied to anything contrived or even changed by man. Some philosophers, to be sure, encourage a soupy sort of reductionism. "Nature who made the mason, made the house," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. That notion is nonsense. It is plain as rain that people...
...time the conversation was over. Featherman had given the dean the brush...