A Lively Exhibition At TMA Pushes The Definition Of Landscape Painting. By Margaret Regan THE LANDSCAPE HAS had such an up-and-down history in art that a big show now at the Tucson Museum of Art bears the name Rediscovering the Landscape of the Americas, with an emphasis on the "re." The lively traveling exhibition showcases the works of some 75 painters whose definitions of landscape painting are decidedly freewheeling. The artists typify almost every contemporary landscape impulse, from the picturesque to the political to the abstract. There are even what you might call anti-landscapes, honest urban paintings with imagery almost completely untainted by nature. Richard Estes' 1993 photorealistic portrait of the Brooklyn Bridge, with a view west toward Manhattan, contains not a tree nor a twig nor a human. Within his hardscape, only the sky and the sunlight represent the great outdoors. Other painters use the land mostly as a pretext for exuberant near-abstractions. Hunt Slonem's 1995 "Narciso" is a jungle thickly painted in blacks and reds and oranges, but you almost can't see the jungle for the paint. Pursuing the opposite impulse, some of the painters have made pleasantly old-fashioned forays into the picturesque. Dorothy Knowles' watery acrylic "Towering Clouds in a Blue Sky," 1991, even reprises the conventions of the traditional English watercolor. Still others, such as Paul Resika ("The Green Wall and Church"), paint architecture blending happily into the land, making the colored planes of the houses part of the pungent geometry of the earth. In short, the practice of the art of the landscape appears to be proceeding with vigor at the fin de siècle, even though there might be some disagreement over whether a subway car (painted by Willie Birch) or a painted plywood target (Paterson Ewen) has much to do with nature. So why must landscape be rediscovered? Where has it been? Time was, along about the Middle Ages, landscape wasn't even a genre. Oh, it might appear as background for a picture of a saint, or supply a lovely leaf pattern to frame the pages of an illuminated manuscript, but it was of minor importance. As the art historian Kenneth Clark so elegantly put it, "If our earthly life is no more than a brief and squalid interlude, then the surroundings in which it is lived need not absorb our attention." By the Renaissance, as Western culture turned its attention less to the heavens and more to that squalid interlude on earth, the landscape started taking over more and more of the picture. Eventually, of course, by the 19th century, the landscape had been transformed into a thing sublime. In America, painters eager to create a home-grown art took their European painting lessons and made exalted images of the new land, first of the Catskill Mountains, then of the craggy Rockies out West. In the works of Albert Bierstadt and Frederick Church, the unspoiled wilderness became a painterly metaphor for purity. In this century, landscape's fortunes dipped once again, when modernism and the other -isms directed serious painters to the pursuit of pure form, with a few notable exceptions. But nowadays, following the return of representational painting in the last generation, and the brilliant use of land metaphors by painters like the German Anselm Kiefer, landscape painting is respectable once more. Rediscovering the Landscape appropriately directs its attention to the painters in the New World. (There are few Canadians and Mexicans in the group, a disappointment considering that landscape painting in Mexico is so energetic.) These artists are still influenced by the 19th-century painters who stood in awe of the vast American continent. It's an easy hop from the earlier painters' reverence for the land to contemporary environmental advocacy, and there's plenty of it in this show. More than a few of the painters dissect the creeping sprawl that's littering urban debris on former greenswards all over the country. David Campbell's "I-95 and Boston," a 1991-94 oil on gessoed panel, is a bird's-eye view of the old colonial city, its tiny church spires and clapboard houses choked by skyscrapers and smog, interstates and traffic. Janet Culbertson is more to the point. Her mixed media "Paving America No. 5" pictures our future: a glittery tangle of silver highways that simply leaves no room for the land. Not all the painters deliver a political message. Some simply want to use the landscape as a jumping-off point for painterly explorations, or to record the particular beauty of their own place. But whatever their intentions, hardly any of these painters is untouched by modernism. Neil Welliver, sometimes called the "dean of American landscape painting," is represented by "Study of Small Barren," a 1992 oil of a Maine hillock dappled with snow. Welliver applies his paint in distinctive color patches, a technique that owes a little to abstraction, a little to cubism. Janet Fish is a mid-career painter who came of age in the days of conceptual art and minimalism. She and her little flower and landscape paintings found it rough going at first. But even her work could not be mistaken for 19th-century paintings. In her 1991 oil "Wild Roses," the colors are light and clear and distinctively daubed, and her oddly cropped composition, with the roses in close-up floating above a bucolic farm, owes a debt to photography. And no painter of the sublime would have allowed a lowly clump of flowers to obscure the metaphoric view of the distant hills, as Fish did. Joan Nelson is another well-known painter who, like Fish, focuses in on a single element drawn from the land. Her 1991 "Untitled (No. 320)" is a tiny painting of a tiny tree, rendered in oil and ink on wood. The tree stands starkly against a blank background, like a botany specimen clipped and preserved for study. It's like a dusty scientific artifact from a long-ago age, a time when trees grew freely and untrammeled in a new land. Or even a religious relic, reminding us how close we are to squandering the blessings of the earth during our "brief and squalid interlude." Rediscovering the Landscape of the Americas continues through November 8 at the Tucson Museum of Art, 140 N. Main Ave. Hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Saturday, noon to 4 p.m. Sunday. For more information call 624-2333.

		© 1995-97 Tucson Weekly . Info Booth