ISBN: 978-1-955260-36-7
Front Cover: Grace Graupe-Pillard, Green Rush , 2023, Oil alkyd on canvas, 66 x 48”
Title Page: Nancy Genn, Patagonia 55 , 2022, Casein on canvas, 72 x 36”
The Call of The Wild, Paintings Inspired by, Referencing, or Evoking Nature, February 10 - Aprill 11, 2025
Published by:
David Richard Gallery, LLC, 245 East 124th Street, 11K, New York, NY 10035 www.DavidRichardGallery.com
212-882-1705
Gallery Staff:
DavidRichardGalleries1 DavidRichardGallery
David Eichholtz and Richard Barger, Managers
All rights reserved by David Richard Gallery, LLC. No part of this catalogue may be reproduced in whole or part in digital or printed form of any kind whatsoever without the express written permission of David Richard Gallery, LLC.
Catalogue: © 2025 David Richard Gallery, LLC, New York, NY
Images by: Yao Zu Lu
All Artworks Courtesy David Richard Gallery:
Copyright © Howard Daum Estate
Copyright © Sonia Gechtoff, Artist Enterprise Holdings
Copyright © Nancy Genn
Copyright © Grace Graupe-Pillard
Copyright © Luke Gray
Copyright © George Hofmann
Copyright © Matsumi Kanemitsu Estate
Copyright © James Kelly, Artist Enterprise Holdings
Copyright © Ronnie Landfield
Copyright © Thornton Willis
Catalogue Design: David Eichholtz and Richard Barger, David Richard Gallery, LLC, New York, NY
Calling the Wild
Nature has been a source of inspiration and rich content for artists throughout the centuries. While it might not seem as obvious, contemporary artists and even those who seek and create non-objective imagery and compositions, often mine the natural world and primordial instincts for emulation, or stimulation and creativity, or even a fountain of energy and rejuvenation. The artists in this presentation have sourced nature to varying degrees and in different ways including landscapes, celestial skies, water and waves, forces of nature, indigenous peoples, birds, animals, and the seasons.
Most of the artists in this presentation have relied on unique combination of gestures, shapes, color, and texture to create their marks and iconography, compelling compositions, and hint at the primordial referent that took them to easel in the first place, whether in subtle imagery, or leading title, or both. The artworks span from 1964 to 2023 and a range of art historical periods and movements including Art Informel, Abstract Expressionism, Indian Space Painting, Post Painterly Abstraction, Color Field, Op Art, and Hard Edge painting.
David Eichholtz
February 2025, New York
20 x 24 x 1.5”
Framed 22” x 25.75” x 2”
Howard Daum was a member of the group of Indian Space Painters along with Steve Wheeler, Peter Busa, Robert Barrell, and Will Barnet. These painters and this movement initially paralleled Abstract Expressionism, then split off as a separate endeavor in 1940. They all studied under Hans Hofmann but were less interested in the gestural abstraction of the day. In the early 1940s they were inspired by the artwork of the indigenous people in the northwest US. Their paintings were dense layers of shapes and forms inspired by indigenous iconography, decorative motifs, symbols and derivations thereof. The artworks of many indigenous tribes were rooted in nature, plants, animals, living as one with the land, earth, and seasons, and recognizing the circle of life and connections with the past, present and future.
Devouring Wave , 1984
and graphite on paper
49 x 40.25”
Gechtoff arrived in San Francisco in 1951, working on very large canvases and developing a unique method of applying thick, impasto layers of pigment with forceful, full-bodied downward strokes using a palette knife. She worked and meticulously painted every square inch of the canvas with thoughtful and deliberate strokes that sculpted the surface with layers of overlapping paint that produced, in the words of the New York Times critic Dore Ashton, “a surface similar to the overlapping feathers of a wet bird.” [1] Centrally located focal points were surrounded with detailed grounds that evoked forces of nature, such as water, wind, fire, and smoke. Later in her career, the forces of nature moved from the background and became the subject of her paintings coinciding with her shift to acrylic paint applied with brushes. At the same time, Gechtoff also introduced her unique twist of drawing with graphite on the surfaces of the paintings to provide the lusciousness, depth, and perceived dimensionality that she missed from impasto applications of oil medium. The drawing with graphite on acrylic paint became an iconic feature in nearly all of Gechtoff’s artworks from the 1960s and onward.
Untitled - SG-1987-AGP-508
From Waterfall Series
1987
Acrylic and graphite on paper
41 x 33.25”
Gechtoff was fascinated with forces of nature such as water, waves, wind, fire and smoke. She herself was a force of nature on many levels, as an artist, wife, mother, teacher and colleague. She was inspired by her passion for art, but also grand opera, theatre and the stage. Gechtoff painted with the opera at full volume, which transported her to a different place and unleashed a power that brought together bold pigment, slashing strokes, swirling texture and forces from beyond to create a raging storm or inferno on her canvas.
In the 1980s Gechtoff began incorporating waves, smoke, and flames along with architectural elements, gardens, and celestial bodies such as moons and suns in her paintings. She was painting in parallel on both canvas and large format paper using acrylic paint and rendering with graphite pencil on top of the paint. She preferred to model her structures, forms, and elemental forces of nature using graphite—it provided the depth and gravitas from the deep black color and sheen of the burnishing that she loved decades earlier with oil medium. She loved paper as a support just as much as canvas and continued working on both supports throughout her career.
Genn’s early Abstract Expressionist paintings were very much influenced by Michel Tapié, a critic, theorist and painter known for his influences on Tachisme, an approach to expressionistic painting in France in the 1950s and 60s. Along with Dubuffet and Breton, Tapié founded the Compagnie de l’Art Brut. Tapié is also credited with L’art Informel by way of his book, “Art of Another Kind”, published in 1952 describing a style of art making in Europe, and more specifically “action paining” and “lyrical abstraction”, in response to American Abstract Expressionism. In Michel Tapié’s seminal publication, Morphologie Autre, 1960, he located Nancy Genn’s artworks alongside those of Carla Accardi, Alberto Burri, Lucio Fontana and Emilio Vedova.
Asian influences of calligraphy also had a tremendous impact on Genn’s lyrical flowing brush strokes in her early 1950s and 60s paintings as she emulated mark making with full use of the artist’s hand. The natural world, in particular color and light and their interplay with water, plant surfaces, and atmospheric elements such as fog, inspired her layering of translucent layers of color to create geometric shapes and framing devices. Combined with her lyrical brush marks of closer and/or thicker brush strokes, they morphed into translucent planes of color replicating what the artist saw as she looked westward from the East Bay across the water towards San Francisco and the Pacific Ocean.
During a trip to Patagonia where Nancy Genn experienced the massive glaciers brought a tectonic scale to her aesthetic and a broader environmental perspective and historical world view to her artworks. It also marked a grand return to the basic element of water that has dominated her work throughout career. The “Patagonia” series of tall vertical paintings with their distinct horizontal blue colored bands as supports for the cascades of water capture the striations from the soil trapped in the glaciers that come down to the water, marking the elevations over the centuries while the current waterfalls flow freely from the melting ice. The imagery was a literal marking of time, nature’s “mark making” and visual record for all to see.
The newest paintings by Grace Graupe-Pillard from her current series of works that comment on the environmental, social, and global impact of climate change. The irony, of course, is that the adverse impact of climate change to humans was caused by humans, but due more to individual interests, along with disregarding warnings by scientists and naturalists, then out of ignorance.
The paintings of Luke Gray are fresh, spontaneous, and almost automatic – the focus is on the brushstroke. Paint is applied quickly with a minimal, yet bold color palette and broad strokes that flow rhythmically across the canvas. Gray’s work is mature, the marks and compositions are not over worked and convey an inner connection and harmony between artist and canvas. The work is instinctive, artist and canvas have become one, the hand and brush are the communication device between the two and the discussion is not technical, but intuitive.
Gray’s paintings evoke tribal and calligraphic symbols, elemental building blocks created with each brushstroke; thus, there is something familiar about his almost primal mark making and language that calls for engagement. Initially, the compositions appear nonobjective, but upon further inspection they are illusionistic, requiring the viewer to resolve them for themselves and make their own interpretation.
Daytime Meteo r, 2022
18 x 24”
Hofmann’s paintings reference nature, earth elements and contemplative moments from his personal life. However, his work has evolved more out of emotion and less from his classical and analytical art training. Hofmann uses his gut reaction to making decisions about color selections, painting surfaces and methods of applying pigment to supports. In that regard, he sees his work as more ideological and being true to himself and his emotions rather than what is popular at any moment in time. His application of paint by a variety of methods, including staining, brushing, layering and overpainting is thus soulful, creating an experience of the world he sees and moments he has lived, rather than a detailed picture or actual image.
Having studied during the peak and later years of Abstract Expressionism, then beginning his professional career alongside the explosion of Color Field painting, it is no wonder his work is rooted in bold, strong gestures with swaths and large passages of harmonic hues of color. Creating abstract paintings for over six decades, Hofmann explores color and form using a variety of techniques with saturated hues and dilute glazes of acrylic paint. His preferred supports are canvas, linen and paper. However, recently, Hofmann has been working on smooth wood panels that reveal the grain so that he can build and excavate the paint to fragment his compositions on a natural surface, making them more reductive and a different viewing experience.
Matsumi Kanemitsu
Pacific Series #23 , 1981
Acrylic on canvas
48 x 48”
Matsumi (“Mike”) Kanemitsu came out of traditional Japanese painting and Abstract Expressionism as part of the Cedar Bar crowd in New York. Living and working in NY at the beginning of his professional career, he was friends with De Kooning, Kline and the rest of the New York School. He later moved to Los Angeles in the early 1960s where he painted and taught until his death. He exhibited in important galleries including Dwan Gallery, Janus Gallery and Louis Newman in LA. He was included in numerous museum exhibitions and collections.
“In his late years Mike saw his painting as a metaphor- equal and opposite- of the poetry, grandeur, tranquility, and life-threatening violent potential in the force of nature. He could not help agreeing with his friend, Jackson Pollock, that when he was IN his painting, working in a trance like state, he was nature itself.” — Gerald Nordland
“To me, I want my work to be like life- everything that is different or opposite to be in balance, like yin and yang, negative and positive, day and night. I want to be just like sunshine, like moon.”
— Matsumi Kanemitsu
Bio Courtesy https://www.matsumikanemitsu.com/kanemitsu-biography
James Kelly (1913 – 2003) is an American Painter. He was championed by Walter Hopps and included in his first curatorial foray, the seminal Merry Go Round exhibition of 1955. In Los Angeles, Kelly was one of the original artists at The Ferus Galley. Kelly’s work is included in the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitey Museum, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. His career and output spanned: hard-edge geometric paintings from the 1940’s, California Abstract Expressionism from the 1950’s, Pop from the 1960s, Minimalism from the 1970s, and even his last painting representing the artist’s return to his own personal language of painterly abstraction from the 1980s and onward.
While Kelly was a proponent of abstraction, he did not limit himself to any one approach or methodology and felt free to combine whatever inspired him in the moment of creation. However, he was inspired throughout his career by music, contemporary culture and the human condition. The natural world was often a theme in many of his painterly, gestural series.
Ronnie Landfield
Irresistible Force , 1999
Acrylic on canvas 57 x 58”
“[…] Working in the tradition of Color Field painting pioneered by Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis, Landfield’s practice involves pouring and staining. […] As a teenager, Landfield experimented with gestural expressionism and hard-edge abstraction. By the late 1960s, he was making wall-sized pour paintings that conjure cosmic landscapes despite their creation in the artist’s post-industrial downtown studios. Far from being fit for history’s dustbin, the radical art experiments of the countercultural period remain a source of ongoing inspiration. Originally bought by architect Philip Johnson, and then donated to and exhibited at MoMA, Landfield’s magisterial 1969 painting Diamond Lake is overdue for returning to view in the museum’s galleries.” [1]
“[…] Like Mark Rothko, Landfield swathes color in bands and horizontal layers that transfer an extraordinary affective energy to the viewer. […] Charting the temporal and tonal passages between night and morning in their fluid collisions of darkness and light, Landfield’s paintings suggest an effervescence nearly unbound by humanity’s march towards destruction. Grounded to this world through horizontal bands of opaque color that typically border their bottom edge, his abstracted landscapes chart “The Forward Path” towards spiritual renewal in an ever more apocalyptic world. […]”[1]
[1] Ara Osterweil, Ronnie Landfield: Recent Works, in The Brooklyn Rail, ARTSEEN, November 2024
https://brooklynrail.org/2024/11/artseen/ronnie-landfield-recent-works/
Thornton Willis has lived in his SoHo loft in New York since the mid-1960s, a source of inspiration where his friends and colleagues visited, he married Vered Lieb, raised his family, and where he created seven-decades of magnificent artwork.
During the early years in SoHo, Pop Art, Minimalism and Conceptualism were dominant in the New York art scene following Abstract Expressionism and a time when everyone declared painting dead. Yet, Willis continued to paint and focused on abstraction. His compositions are non-objective with references and influences unique to his interests and early studies in architecture that become manifest in structured compositions and geometric imagery. He was and remains rigorous in his compositions and geometric shapes, but not with his application of pigment where he was less concerned with perfection and preferred to have his process be fully revealed with edits, drips, residue, and painting outside the borders. Willis has always had an intuitive sense of color and tends to use the highest contrasting hues possible. The colors are often layered, leveraging transparency and opacity to provide a range of hues and values and residue of the preceding colors as part of his organic process of painting.
Even though Willis’s paintings are rooted in the rigor of architecture and geometry, they feel organic with earth tones and brushy surfaces. Not only does Willis have an intuitive sense for color, he is also intuitive regarding the world and people around him, including the natural world and human condition. He operates with simple and straight forward truths and empathy, there is an authenticity and sincerity in his work and painting. For example, the Lattice series of paintings was inspired by his memories of his grandmother’s garden and the rose trellises around her porch. Many of color palettes and titles are inspired by celestial skies, animals and people.
