Word: scape
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...best of his 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...
Erks' territory is also a modern land scape of bleak mining towns, rundown homesteads and rural junkyards. Keeble resonantly plays the present against the past, especially in descriptions of Erks' dangerous drive over the mountains and across deserts. There are intensely perceived set pieces: a dog battling a possum; a woman reassembling a carburetor with Zen-like grace; a Snopesian funeral in a field littered with rusty tractor parts and dominated by the sight and smell of a huge pig roasting on a spit...