Home Paintings 2001 Paintings 2002 Paintings 2003 Paintings 2004 Paintings 2005 Paintings 2006 Paintings 2007 Prints About the Artist Contact the artist Influences News, Upcoming Shows, Links

Below is an article that I wrote for the BYU Museum of art magazine this last fall; it effectively identifies some of my influences and summarizes aspects of my painting philosophy: A Reflection on George Inness’s November, Montclair By Kerry Soper     George Inness’s painting, November, Montclair has always intrigued me because of its liminal qualities.  With its muted colors and half-defined forms, it seems poised somewhere between observable reality and abstraction, the terrestrial world and a spiritual dreamscape.  Like this painting, Inness’s reputation or legacy seems to exist between art movements: he was a student of the Hudson River School in the early years of his career, a follower of the Barbizon movement in mid-life, and finally a school of one—advocating a type of transcendental, mystical landscape painting nicely represented by this image.  Because of this iconoclasm, he is often slighted by art history textbook authors who do not know how to classify him conveniently.   If given proper consideration, however, he emerges as a true pioneer of modernism—a painter who anticipated many of the spiritual objectives and aesthetic practices of mid-twentieth century artists such as Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock.      Inness’s began his career at the National Academy of Design as a dutiful follower of  Hudson River School masters such as Thomas Cole and Asher Durand; his early paintings attempted to capture the grandeur of American and European landscapes with panoramic compositions and a showy amount of visual information.  After trips to Europe in the 1850s, however, he converted to the aesthetic theory and methods of the French Barbizon school.  Led by French painters such as Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, and Jean-Francois Millet, this movement advocated a type of humble realism or naturalism in which no romantic drama or elaborate historical or moral lesson unfolds; instead, using tonalist colors, blurred forms, and naturalistic brushstrokes, these realists celebrated the everyday beauties of peasant folk, rural life, and local landscapes.      Even after embracing the democratic, modest methods of the Barbizon school, Inness continued through his mid career (the 1860s) to create paintings that were somewhat grandiose in their scope.  It was only in the last decades of his life, after he moved to Montclair, New Jersey, that his most unique style fully emerged.  To the methods of the Barbizon School he added his own spiritual beliefs on the “spiritual essences” of physical landscapes.  Here he was inspired by the philosophical theologian, Emmanuel Swedenborg, who articulated a “theory of correspondences”—the neoplatonic concept that every physical object in the mortal world has a corresponding, spiritual essence (Promey 50).     The hazy, seemingly unfinished quality of November, Montclair, can be interpreted according to these methods and ideas.  Inness asserted, for example, that “Art is a subtle essence.  It is not a thing of surfaces, but a moving spirit” (Bell 74).  This painting often troubles students attending the museum because they want it to be, like most traditional landscapes, “a thing of surfaces”—a realistic image to be readily decoded and admired.   But because of its poetically unfinished or half-defined forms, however, it insists on being something more challenging—a physical representation of a spiritual interior or unconscious dreamscape.  Prodding us towards this figurative interpretation is the presence of a lone, wandering figure in the painting; he or she is our entry or guide into this spiritual landscape.      The paintings of Inness’s late career represent a second path—next to Impressionism—towards modernism.  Whereas impressionism harnessed an almost scientific conceptions of color, light and the eye’s perception to push realism into more experimental and expressive realms, Inness’s spiritual tonalism pointed towards the modernists’ interest in using art to represent abstract spiritual ideas, the realms of the unconscious, and intense emotions.  Indeed, Inness seemed to anticipate many of the methods and concerns of modernism: an aggressive, almost expressionistic application of paint; a push towards abstraction as a way of communicating ineffable emotional or spiritual truths; and a shift in emphasis away from canned realism to the virtues of process and exploration.  The colorfield paintings of Mark Rothko, for example, seem to be direct descendants of Inness’s mystical landscapes: Rothko’s horizontal colorfields evoke the same simplified, tonal dreamscapes, and in purpose they serve as similar entries to spiritual meditation or exploration.  Pollock’s action paintings, too, owe a debt to Inness’s almost violent application of paint and to their ability to capture in non-literal ways the immensity and complexity of the natural world on canvas.  The lone spiritual wanderer in Inness’s painting becomes you, the viewer, in the museum, when viewing a fully abstract Rothko or Pollock,     In the end, while Inness can rightly be celebrated as a pioneer of modernist aesthetics, he is much more than a significant footnote in a historical “progression” towards abstraction; indeed, he remains a viable model to contemporary landscape painters who want to draw the best ideas and methods from both traditional realism and abstract modernism.  There is a group of Utah artists, in fact, that have a real affinity for, and similarity to, Inness in their pursuit of a type of metaphysical landscape realism. They include Gary Earnest Smith, Michael Workman, Douglas Fryer, and Brad Aldridge.  When talking about their work, all of these artists seem to echo Inness’s desire to allow landscape paintings to be more than mere records of surfaces, perceived with a cold eye; according to them, they should also strive to be something more powerful and profound—documents of a “moving spirit”, of spiritual essences, or of ineffable emotional impressions.  Inspired in equal measure, perhaps, by Mormon theology (which echoes some of Swedenborg’s ideas), a local landscape shaped by exertions of pioneer faith and hard work, and Inness’s model of spiritual abstraction, their paintings embody a type of metaphysical realism that—like Inness’s November, Montclair—transcends the neat and often overly rigid classifications of twentieth century art schools. Work Cited Adrienne Baxter Bell, George Inness and the Visonary Landscape (New York: George Braziller Publishers, 2003. Promey, Sally M., “The Ribband of Faith: George Inness, Color Theory, and the Swedenborgian Church,” American Art Journal Vol. 26 (1994): 44-65.