S E VERI N H AI NES B U ZZ A R DS B AY AND S U RRO U ND INGS B U ZZ ARDS B AY COALIT IO N
COVER OAK AND HOLLY, 201 5, oil on canvas, 36” x 48”
S E V E R I N HA I N E S B U ZZ A R DS B AY AND S U RRO U ND INGS MAY 1 2 – JU N E 1 0, 201 6
114 Front Street New Bedford, Massachusetts 02740 www.savebuzzardsbay.org
A Place in the Landscape
He has been painting outdoors in the Buzzards Bay watershed for more than forty years. In this exhibition “Buzzards Bay and Surroundings” at the Buzzards Bay Coalition, Haines, or ‘Sig’ as he is known to virtually everyone, shows us some of his most cherished places – The Shaw Farm Trail, West Island Reservation, Little Bay, Tinkham Pond, and Quahog Hill. Nearly all of these places are protected lands of the Buzzards Bay Coalition, and they make up just a few of the more than 7,500 acres that the Coalition has saved, to date, for future generations. Some properties the Coalition owns outright, others are held in partnerships with towns, local land trusts, and state conservation agencies, but the Coalition has opened most of them so that we can walk their trails, paddle their waters, and, if you’re Sig Haines, recreate them in an alchemy of color and shape, head and hand.
TO M GIDWITZ
“People mistakenly think that art is about nature, or about an artist’s feelings about nature. It is instead a path of enlightenment and pleasure, one of many paths, where nature and the artist’s feelings are merely raw material.”
Sig, 70, was born in the island town of Skudeneshavn in southwest Norway, but he has lived in the New Bedford area since he was six when his father, a captain in the Norwegian merchant marine, came to New Bedford to fish after World War II devastated Norway’s shipping fleet. Sig showed a flair for drawing at a young age, and he began taking art classes at New Bedford’s Swain School of Design when he was still in grade school. He enrolled at Swain as an undergraduate, went on to earn a Masters degree at Yale, and came back home to teach, first at Swain and then at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. He retired as an emeritus professor in 2011, after thirty-five years in the classroom.
- Wolf Kahn
For most of us, the outdoors is fleeting — we spend a few hours in the woods or on the water, taking pictures and having fun. Over time, though, the snapshots pile up, forgotten, and our memories, no matter how much we savor them, inevitably fade away. But painter Severin Haines does not let nature disappear so easily. He brings the digital photographs he takes on his walks back to his New Bedford studio. There, with pastels, brushes and paint, he plunges anew into their light and shadows, exploring the play of leaves and sky and the flicker of light on water. As he works, he remakes the world, transforming the places he encounters into scenes we all can recognize but yet are totally new.
For almost all of his career, Sig has painted landscapes. He paints the forests and shore of the Buzzards Bay watershed, and, on trips back to Norway, the rough rocks and shimmering seas of his family’s Skudeneshavn home. Landscapes, Sig says, provide him with the means to employ color, shape and sensation in a way that the human figure, interiors, and still lifes lack. “I love nature,” he says. “It gives me everything I need to build a painting.” And the list of things he finds on offer is long: open marshes and dense thickets, tender
“The landscape gives me things that I couldn’t find elsewhere,” he says. “I see things that astound me in it. It’s all those things that are there that I can’t invent, that I don’t think anyone can invent, and it’s such a rich, rich subject matter.” 2
saplings and stately trees, churning waves, placid clouds, morning sun and creeping dusk. “The range in nature is phenomenal, and the colors, whether it’s a subtle painting or a gray painting or a high color one, there’s always a wonderful harmony that I find in nature without really touching or disturbing it.” It is a process he has been exploring for almost his entire career. Sig likes to tell the story of how, when he was a student at Swain and again at Yale, the noted painter Leland Bell gave him critiques he couldn’t decode. “You’re not painting in color,” Bell told him on two separate occasions. Haines was flummoxed. “‘You’re not painting in color….?’ What does that mean? I had a full palate of color!” He found the answer when studying Jackson Pollock’s painting “Blue Poles.” Pollock’s layered drops and dribbles created their own depth and space, illusory planes of forward and back that seemed independent of the canvas. Here color opened the door to a new world. But Pollock’s paintings were abstracts, and Sig was committed to representational art. “The toughest thing of all for the painter is that content question: ‘What shall I paint?’ And I think it’s part of the reason I’m a landscape painter, because then it’s a given. I don’t have to worry about it; there’s more than I can ever paint.”
OA K A N D HOLLY (STUDY), 201 5, pastel on pape r, 1 1 ” x 1 5 ”
pattern that a certain tree makes, a maple versus an oak – and how they play against each other. It all came from those ideas, and frankly it has never stopped giving.” Sig often returns to study modern masters of color and light – he mentions the Frenchmen Claude Monet, Pierre Bonnard, and Edouard Vuillard; the Americans Fairfield Porter and Milton Avery – to explore how they painted objects and the spaces in between. Sig paints either directly from nature, or from photographs. His camera allows him to capture scenes without putting his largest canvases at risk in the wind (“I’ve lost paintings in the ocean!”), and he reproduces them first as pastel drawings and then in oils. He took the idea of drawing the preliminary pastels from the American landscape painter Wolf Kahn; with them he arrives at the color, brightness and saturation that he will use in the oil versions. When he works, he follows his brush where it takes him; as he applies his paint, the scenes’ details of color and shape morph into springboards for soaring flights of self-expression.
Sig strove to use what he calls “the vocabulary of figurative painting” to express what he had discovered. His liberation came when he painted the thickest bunch of briars he could find, a static snarl that he portrayed as if it were in motion, a crowded swarm that writhed on the flat canvas plane. “And when I finished I looked at it and I thought, ‘I’ve never seen a painting like this.’” He continued to explore the diversity of nature’s shapes and colors, superimposing and laying them side by side to depict places that were entirely real yet didn’t quite exist, actual scenes that, with each stroke of paint, revealed themselves afresh on the canvas and in his inner eye. “Suddenly I began to see not only color and color space, but space created by pattern changes – the 3
The shapes lost some of their identities, the strokes of paint came to the fore. “As I paint the marks build up, and I start to really enjoy myself. I’ll see a hint of a color and play it up.” A nearly invisible patch of winter blue that he spied on a tree trunk became a glowing line he soon stretched up the trunk’s entire length. “When things are hitting, when passages are starting to really develop, the work starts to flow very quickly. There’s a kind of aesthetic joy in it, and the excitement builds. I’ve been known to dance around the room, I get that excited.” As with many of Sig’s paintings, when you approach “Morning Ice in December” the subject disintegrates; when you step back, it reappears. It’s a sleight of hand he’s happy to reveal, a way of tugging you along on his journey and into the creative act. “Here’s an image that comes off at first sight at being quite believable and yet, when you come within three feet of it, it’s definitely paint and definitely stroke and there’s definitely a human hand in it, working,” he says. “That’s a very important element to me. I want people to see the process, I want them to see each stroke and how it’s built and how it’s made. I think that kind of thing is exciting for people.”
M O R N IN G ICE IN D E CEM BE R (STU DY), 2015, p a stel o n p ap er, 12” x 12”
As an example, he offers his picture “Morning Ice in December.” Shaw Farm Trail is a one-mile path that links the FairhavenMattapoisett Bike Trail with the Nasketucket Bay State Reservation. It crosses part of a 416-acre land preservation project that the Coalition completed in 2014 after four years of effort. On the December day that it became Coalition property, Sig walked the trail with his daughter Liv. In a few hours he took more than ten dozen photographs, and when he got home he sorted through them for those that, he says, “were really strong.”
When he describes “Oak and Holly,” another painting inspired by a place on the Shaw Farm Trail, one can hear how, even now, he sees its elements pulsate with life. “For me that’s a fabulous dance, what that tree is doing, how it found its way up, and the shape that it makes and this tangle of branches.” The golden reeds in the background were another gift that nature timely supplied to service the finished canvas. “The sun had broken through at that point, and that gave me another color group to play with.” Sig knows that his paintings have inspired people to look more closely at their surroundings and to value the places they see. “I think it’s wonderful that I can get people to appreciate the spaces that the Coalition has,” he says. “Just to enjoy the landscape, in the end, that’s a wonderful thing. As soon as people begin to appreciate what’s around them, to me it guarantees its survival.”
One was of a dark glade in mid-morning, with a stone wall, ice on water, traces of purple and blue. He spied promise in the ground’s dead foliage, potential in the shadows, whispers of an alluring world that lay beyond what was immediately seen. He broke the scene down, shape by shape, color by color, teasing out tones. 4
M O RNING ICE IN DECEMB ER , 201 5, oil on canvas, 42” x 42”
GREEN SAP LING O N T I N KHA M PON D, 201 5, oil on canvas, 30” x 32”
O N TINK H AM PON D, 201 6, oil on canvas, 54” x 6O”
M ARS H IN A JANUARY FOG (STUDY), 201 3, oil on canvas, 1 4” x 1 8”
M ARS H IN A JANUA RY FOG, 201 4, oil on canvas, 48” x 60”
Q UAH O G H ILL (STUDY), 201 3, oil on canvas, 1 0” x 1 2”
Q UAH O G HI LL, 201 4, oil on canvas, 48” x 60”
BEACH , GRASS , REEDS, A N D TR EES, 201 4, oil on canvas, 30” x 36”
FRO M LITTLE BAY TOWA R D WEST, 201 3, oil on canvas, 1 0” x 1 2”
TRE ES AND REEDS AT LI TTLE B AY, 201 5, oil on canvas, 30” x 30”
FIE LD O F GRASS O N S H AW’ S FA R M TR A I L, 201 4, pastel on paper, 1 7” x 1 5”
TH E BLU E POOL, 201 5, oil on canvas, 42” x 48”
Conservationist Aldo Leopold noted that with the natural world – like a car engine or a complex wristwatch – “the first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all of the parts”. Yet we throw away parts of the Buzzards Bay ecosystem every day: we degrade it by adding pollution, we scrape clear forests for new development, we pave over parts of our watershed. But when we strategically protect critical lands, whether they be forests around our drinking water supplies, beach habitats or small streams, we are protecting the essential parts needed to ensure a healthy Bay and watershed into the future.
The Buzzards Bay Coalition saved the places behind Sig’s paintings to protect clean water. But these works underscore the deeply personal reasons to save special natural areas. They are restorative places full of wonder, beauty, calm and magic. And they inspire people to connect with the natural world in all of its complexity, and with all of its parts. These places are now everyone’s to enjoy and protect. And the Buzzards Bay Coalition is actively working each day to save more critical watershed lands like them. To learn more, visit us at www.savebuzzardsbay.org.
MARK RASMUSSEN, President
Dedicated to the restoration, protection and sustainable use and enjoyment of our irreplaceable Bay and its watershed. We work to improve the health of the Bay ecosystem for all through education, conservation, research and advocacy.