A Dialogue with Nature Paintings by Louisa McElwain Essay by Christopher Benson
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A Dialogue with Nature Louisa McElwain cemented her place in the contemporary Southwest canon when she moved to New Mexico in 1985, answering the call to engage new surroundings. She spent the next twenty-eight years painting a robust, ever-changing landscape that enchanted and challenged her on a daily basis. More than a window onto the world, McElwain’s paintings endure as a window into the artist’s mind and soul. Emblems of the sanctity generated from artistic expression found deep within oneself, they carry her legacy of passion, energy, and an abiding love for the land — forever preserved in the paint she heralded as a conduit for the sublime. Elizabeth L. Delaney
Front Cover: Knifewing, Snow Cloud, (detail) 2002 oil on canvas, 24” x 30” 1
Great is Thy Faithfulness, 2011, oil on canvas, 44” x 64”
THE ART OF DISCOVERY
ence, and that we lived and exhibited our pictures in the same small city, Louisa and I never actually met. I was aware of her work, but for whatever reason it hadn’t yet fully caught my attention. Then, while writing a review in 2010 of another artist at EVOKE Contemporary — Louisa’s Santa Fe gallery — I saw some of her most recent paintings on display. These were bold, expressionistic, at times even abstract, and I was immediately taken with them. They had beautiful sculptural surfaces and sophisticated juxtapositions of color. The pieces I’d seen up to then had been skilled, but also familiar treatments of the now well-worn southwestern landscape. These new works were completely fresh and exciting.
Reflections on the Landscape painting of Louisa McElwain
Part One, An Origin Story: I have followed Louisa McElwain’s work since the mid-2000s, when I moved back to New Mexico after having lived, worked and exhibited there (also as a landscape painter) in the late 1980s. Louisa was seven years older than I, so she would have been in her early thirties when she moved to Santa Fe in 1985. I arrived four years later, at age twenty-eight. We had both left our native homes in New England — she from New Hampshire, and I from Rhode Island — after what had been for each of us a sometimes discouraging series of sojourns at some of the more highly-regarded art schools in the Northeast. And yet, despite these shared interests and experi-
In 2013, Louisa died suddenly (and far too young, at age fifty-nine) just as her career was taking off and her reputation was spreading beyond New Mexico’s borders. Shortly after her passing, I wrote a brief 2
review of a posthumous exhibition of her work at EVOKE for a local arts magazine. It was then that I began to think more intently about just what sort of a painter she’d been, where she fit in the larger universe of contemporary art, and also what it meant to make such traditionally aesthetic and pictorial works in an age so committed to artistic innovation and cultural critique.
None of this bears much resemblance to the lively, diverse and bohemian artistic universe that existed in both America and in Europe between the two world wars, and to which a painter of Louisa’s generation would have been looking for inspiration as a young artist. The art world wants us to focus always on what is happening right now; but it actually takes a generation or more to absorb and digest any new form. Artistic time elongates, so that works made even a century in the past can still feel very much a part of the present. As a young person just becoming aware of art in the 1960s, Louisa McElwain’s “now” would have encompassed the whole arc of modern painting, stretching all the way from the Impressionists to Pollock. This was not a remotely straight line. Multiple diverging pathways existed in American painting in the early 1900s. There were the urban realists of the Ashcan School in New York and Philadelphia, regional American modernists like Charles Demuth and Charles Burchfield in Pennsylvania, and Georgia O’Keeffe experimenting with abstraction in New Mexico. There were also illustrative Regionalists like Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton in the Midwest, and more starkly realistic painters such as Charles Sheeler, Edward Hopper and later Alice Neel and Fairfield Porter in the northeast. During and immediately after the Second World War we also saw the rise of the purely Abstract painters of the New York School, and a countering group of figurative Modernists from San Francisco who fused abstraction and representation together.
Since first encountering her work, I have felt that while Louisa superficially fit the regionalist niche
Untitled (early NM landscape), oil on canvas, 20” x 24”
of Southwestern American scene painting, she was a more nuanced, complex — and most importantly to my mind, a more acutely self-defining artist. These would be worthy qualities in any time, but especially in ours, when the most celebrated art reflects a range of approaches and theories which have settled over the past few decades into an informal, but nonetheless rigid doctrine of contemporary art practice. These are ideas that are communicated through the curricula at the colleges and universities where art is now taught as a fully credentialed professional discipline. The perpetually-cycling, fashionable trends which those programs help to shape have also become a crucial selling point in an enormous international market in contemporary art products that is larger, more lucrative, and more calculatingly commercial today than at any other time in history.
A young painter like Louisa — coming to college in the early 1970s in search of that diverse bohemian spirit of the pre-war era, but also arriving just as the high-end contemporary art market in New York was exploding — would have encountered an art school environment that was beginning to look a lot like a training camp for contemporary market success. One could opt instead to join a more traditional academy, as Louisa did in Philadelphia. But as the art world embraced the ethos of the modernist, and later postmodern avant-garde, that tra3
Part Two, The Artist as Shaman:
ditional camp became ever more marginalized and reactionary. They seemed to want to behave as if modernism had never happened at all, and to set the clock back to the time of nineteenth century romantic painters like Thomas Cole or the Hudson River School.
Louisa McElwain was a fiercely independent artist, the kind who wanted to figure out for herself what it meant to be a painter and what kind of painting was most meaningful to her. That searching, creative spirit — of the non-conforming maverick who defines and drives her own creative process — has been the reigning archetype of the artist in our culture even since the Impressionists broke away from the Academy and Salon a century and a half ago. But many young artists today do not work like that any more. In the 1980s and ‘90s, an academic system very like the old European one, but founded on
To be a painter in the U.S. in the 1960s or 70s was to choose a side. You could time-travel to the past at one of the academies, or take up the banner of the vanguard at a school like the Rhode Island School of Design, where the poster-children of art world success in my time weren’t any longer even modernists like Frankenthaler, deKooning or Diebenkorn, but Andy Warhol and the whole conceptualist line that descended from Marcel Duchamp. The problem was, what were you to do if you didn’t wish to join either of those camps? I suspect that for Louisa, much as was the case for me, it was painting itself that was the main attraction, not some ideological formulation about the right nature of art in general. With that love of painting came all the exciting experiments of the centuries that preceded us. Seeing the emphasis in the colleges shift away from all that treasure and towards these ever-more narrowly constrained ideological camps, many painters simply left school, as well as the art scenes of the big cities, and struck out for more congenial environments in which to pursue a different path. Provincial locales like rural New England, the high desert of New Mexico, and the coast of Northern California, which all had their own local art communities and markets, beckoned in part because they were beautiful, interesting places to paint. But it was also possible there to work, exhibit and make a living of sorts without having to parrot either the latest art world trends, or the dogmatic aesthetics of the pre-modern academies. In such a place, a pure painter could chart her own aesthetic path without feeling the contempt of any particular faction sneering over her shoulder. That yearning for a fully self-determining artistic space and practice seems to me to be the key to understanding Louisa’s art.
Entangled Roots, 1984, oil on canvas, 18” x 24”
avant-garde principles instead of classical ones, was reborn in the fine arts programs at American colleges and universities. Like the academic painters of the 1800s, artists trained in this system faithfully reflect those ideas and values even as they strive to project an appearance of innovative autonomy. But it is the system, and not the individual artists, which determines art’s proper role in society, and which continuously propels the fashionable cycles in which the monstrous international art market traffics. These are two completely different ways of thinking about and making art. In the first instance (as 4
titled The Symbol Without Meaning. In it, he drew a distinction between the mystical shamans of early, democratically organized hunter-gatherer societies, and the more doctrinary priestly castes of later, hierarchically ordered agrarian communities. In Campbell’s telling, the Shaman and Priest (and both men and women have occupied either role at different times and in different cultures throughout history) served distinctly different functions. The Shaman was an individually-seeking spiritual medium who went out alone “beyond the pale” of the tribal enclosure to achieve a communion with whatever greater powers existed in the natural world. The awakened consciousness won through that quest or struggle could then be brought back and shared with the other members of the tribe. The Priest, on the other hand, was the curator and facilitator of some pre-existing, perhaps divinely-received, edifice of ritual or law. Where the Shaman merged with the greater power, thus becoming an incarnation of it — the Priest worshiped and interpreted that power’s supposed intent, which was distinctly separate from, and superior-to, his or her individual being. As Campbell put it: Bosque, oil on canvas, 1985, 28” x 18”
The highest concern of all of the mythologies, ceremonials, ethical systems, and social organizations of the agriculturally based societies has ever been that of suppressing the manifestations of individualism; and this has been generally achieved by compelling or persuading people to identify themselves not with their own interests, intuitions, or modes of experience, but with archetypes of behavior and systems of sentiment developed and maintained in the public domain.
in Louisa’s case) the whole knowledge of what art is and can be is carried within, and interpreted by the individual maker. In the second, that knowledge is entrusted to a professional class of instructors, curators, critics and dealers whose interpretations and valuations the individual reflects in her work, however personally expressive that work may be. These opposed poles, of the individual and the institution, echo an ancient divide between a mystical, self-determining spiritual exploration on the one hand, and the orthodoxies of ordained religious practice on the other. Art is not religion, but in our secular, corporate age it may be as close as some of us ever get to the quests for higher meaning that drove the earliest spiritual mystics of many different cultures.
In the interviews that he later did with Bill Moyers for their famous Power of Myth series on PBS, Campbell elaborated on the Shaman’s and the Priest’s respective roles: There’s a major difference as I see it between a Shaman and a Priest. A Priest is a functionary of a social sort. The society worships certain deities in a certain way, and the Priest becomes ordained as a functionary to car-
Joseph Campbell, the American scholar of the mythologies of the ancient world, wrote a paper in 1957 5
contemporary landscapist Neil Welliver, both of whom introduced her to the color theories of the abstract formalist Josef Albers.
ry on that ritual. And the deity to whom he is devoted is a deity who was there before he came along. The Shaman’s powers are symbolized in familiars — deities of his own personal experience, and his authority comes out of a psychological experience, not a social ordination.
It is plain from all this history that Louisa’s interests were diverse, open and intelligent. But she was too independent to claim membership in any single movement. Venturing instead out to these western provinces where she could comfortably be herself, she invented a directly responsive, site-specific expressionism.
As a member of a generational subset of art world and academy refuseniks who wanted to let their own experience tell them what sort of art they were meant to make, Louisa McElwain firmly fits Campbell’s image of the artist as a Shaman. It is not that she was indifferent to the movements swirling around her, but merely that she wasn’t willing to let them define her. The entrenched ideological camps, of the traditionalists on the one side and the avant-gardists on the other, seemed determined to establish in the public mind exactly which was the “right” kind of art to make. But for Louisa — and for many other artists like her (myself included) — it was not the kind of art you chose to make that mattered, but why you chose to make it.
*** Painting is not a form of industrial manufacture, despite that the uniformly turned-out products in many an art fair booth or Chelsea gallery might suggest otherwise. The over-arching corporate consciousness of our age would love to reduce every kind of human effort to the terms and values of marketability – and a consistently recognizable “brand” is the key to repeated market success in every sector. But the defining aspect of artistic practice that makes for genuinely outstanding painting is a willingness to forsake dependable market formulas in favor of riskier experiments that often fail before opening the way to a greater success.
Louisa made pictures of beautiful, dramatic landscapes that were easy to relate-to without an art school education, but her work does not lack art historical sophistication. Like other smart, historically astute representational painters of her generation, she referenced the deep American traditions of both realism and abstraction at the same time. She even referred to herself as “a secular Modernist”, a term which suggests that she embraced the achievements of individual Modern painters, but not the strict orthodoxies and art historical classifications that claimed them.
At her best, and when all the components came together in perfect harmony, Louisa MacElwain synthesized a robust, muscular gesture with a lightfilled chromatic palette which together describe three-dimensional geological and atmospheric form in a thoughtfully constructed compositional architecture. In terms of light and color, she achieved something like what Monet had done in his series of haystacks in the French countryside, of Rouen Cathedral seen at different times of day, or in his famous cycle of Water Lilies painted in his gardens at Giverny. But in Louisa’s imagery, color was not rendered in the vaporously suggestive manner of Monet, but in a mark-making as intentionally physical and present on the plane of its ground as in deKooning’s Montauk Highway or one of Rich-
The ideas that Louisa did absorb through her education in the east include those of the pre-Modernist American landscape painters, as well as the expressive gestures of the Action Painters of the New York School. She also engaged directly with some of the more consciously modern representational painters of her time, studying during a summer residency at the prestigious Skowhegan School in Maine with Alex Katz, and also with the austere 6
ard Diebenkorn’s Bay Area street scenes. She successfully married the direct physicality of Abstract Expressionism to an unapologetic love of evocative, magically illusionistic pictures. And she had the guts and self-assurance to believe that that was both an acceptable and a worthwhile thing to do.
WAS the landscape. All three components became one in the action. As she herself said:
Louisa came to the desert as a young woman, possibly looking for an escape from the factionalism of the larger world of art, and hoping — I imagine — to contact some bigger, external natural force that might fill the equally vast interior space of her artistic aspirations. In these respects she did as the shamans of old did, by venturing out past the boundaries of then dominant artistic creeds and engaging the huge, weird, living surface of the earth head-on. Like a fighter in the ring, she beat, battered and carved at her canvasses in such a fluid, responsive dance that one might have wondered when seeing her at work just exactly where she ended and the painting began. In truth, there was no boundary between the two. She WAS the painting, which in turn
. Above Burro Springs, oil on canvas, 20” x 30”
. . . painting in solitude, I discovered something that was happening to me, that was not coming from me . . . the more I painted in these places, the more I realized that I am not the origin of this creativity that is flowing through me. — Christopher Benson, Santa Fe, 2020
Be Thou Strong My Habitation, 2012, oil on canvas, 48” x 72” 7
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Eirene, 2011, oil on canvas, 46” x 64” 9
El Amanecer, 2005 oil on canvas, 54” x 84”
Saguaro spring rain, 2004 oil on canvas, 72” x 54” 10
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Palo Quemado, 1993 oil on canvas, 40” x 50” 12
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Arroyo, 1984 oil on canvas, 18” x 28”
Arroyo II, 1984 oil on canvas, 20” x 24” 14
Summer Hayfields, Truchas, 1990 oil on canvas, 24” x 36“
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My chosen tool for applying paint to canvas is the knife, for two reasons: to curb my ability to describe objects, and to move paint with velocity, articulate delicacy, and sensuous impasto. I strive to allow the beauty of the paint, moved by the impulse of the Creator’s spirit which flows through me, to say something honest, deep and true about my experience of Natue, to make paintings that gratify the mind and nourish the soul. 17
Sage of Worlds, 2002 oil on canvas, 56” x 72” 18
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Mountain Verga II, 2003 oil on canvas, 38 x 54
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Conference, Earth and Sky, 2001 oil on canvas, 56” x 72”
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Preserve Stock Pond, 2004 oil on canvas, 34” x 46”
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The Yard at Sams Tractor Repair, 2008 oil on canvas, 15” x 30”
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Small is Beautiful, 2008 oil on canvas, 18” x 24”
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Pasture Spring, Rocks, Grass, 2001 oil on canvas, 46” x64”
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Browsed Willows, 2006 oil on canvas, 12” x 24”
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Navajo, 2005 oil on canvas, 54” x 62” 28
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Extra Terrestrial, 2009 oil on canvas, 44” x 62”
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Gathering, 2000 oil on canvas, 40” x 60”
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Selected Collections American Embassy, Bogota, Columbia American Embassy, Manama, Bahrain American Embassy, Sanaa, Yemen American Embassy, Singapore AT&T, Fresno CA Coors Brewing Co, Golden CO INA Corp. Harrisburg PA NATO Headquarters, Brussels, Belgium Nokia, Irving TX Peat Marwick, San Francisco, CA Pepsi-Cola, Riverside CA Philadelphia Zoological Society, Philadelphia PA Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ Rosewoods Vineyards, Redwood Valley, CA San Juan College, Farmington, NM St. Vincent Hospital Foundation, Santa Fe, NM The Booth Museum, Cartersville, GA Tia Collection, Santa Fe, NM Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson AZ University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA University of Texas Law School, Austin TX
Education Santa Fe Institute of Fine Arts, NM Master Class with Wolf Kahn, Santa Fe, NM University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA: BFA Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan ME Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia PA Nera Simi Drawing Studio, Florence, Italy Hampshire College, Amherst, MA Mount Holyoke College, sculpture with Leonard De Longa, South Hadley, MA 33
A Red Canyon (detail), 1993 oil on canvas, 36” x 48”
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