Being and Place

by Alice Gauvin

Since his last solo exhibition at the Bowery Gallery in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City, which took place in January 2020, Simon Carr has been painting the landscape of Cherry Plain, a hamlet in upstate New York where the Carr family has kept a residence for generations. “That particular landscape is so ingrained in me, it’s so accessible,” remarked Carr at the beginning of a conversation in February in preparation for this show. “My whole life has been there.” Working from memory in his studio, he continually reshuffles the landscape he knows so well: mountains and fields move, trees go up and down and in and out. Horses also appear in Carr’s Cherry Plain scenes, populating pastures and hillsides, often rendered in deep shades of red against green, gold, or flesh-colored fields. In many paintings, these horses are accompanied by riders, usually his wife Cristina or his daughter Gabriella. For Carr, horses have become an integral part of the Cherry Plain landscape in recent years: “they’re so much a key to the landscape, and so much a way into the landscape” he says, adding, “and it’s what Cristina does.”

Carr was raised in the West Village of Manhattan in the 1950s. Despite having grown up during the Abstract Expressionist boom and borne witness to the parade of artistic blockbusters for which the city has become (in)famous, narrative painting has been the bread and butter of his career as an artist. Along with landscapes of Cherry Plain, Carr’s recent works include a series of paintings from the city: river walks, farmers markets, subway rides, and other scenes from in and around the West Village. A little longer ago, his focus was Biblical episodes. His work often depicts human relationships and interactions, although he has a lifelong affinity for animals, too: his first show at the Bowery Gallery featured paintings of dogs and hunters. Even in the city scenes, animals make frequent cameos. As in a painting by William Hogarth or George Stubbs, artists Carr admires, these creatures tend to be active players in the drama, or else playing out parallel scenes of their own. In his recent paintings, horses have an increasingly starring role: “If you find the horse, the whole landscape opens up,” says Carr. Beyond their utility in understanding the pictorial space, he professes his fascination with horses as subjects and his affection for them as companions—“taking care of them gives me such pleasure.” The horses contribute to the sense of place, signaling the presence of family and the proximity of home.

These bucolic scenes are fundamentally peaceful, yet there’s an insistent physicality to every painting: each pulsates and hums with activity. Carr paints in what has become his characteristic style: scumbled layers of acrylic paint mixed with sand. The resulting braille-like surfaces give these paintings a delicious tactility and material presence. This, in conjunction with Carr’s ingrained understanding of Hofmann’s “push and pull” color theory (he studied under Jim

Gahagan, a former Hofmann student) and his confident brushwork (he uses house painting brushes), creates an integrated whole picture that is brimming with an almost kinetic energy. Take the creamy blues and yellows in Moonscape, or the pastel pinks and purples of Three Trees: in both paintings, even such soft colors take on an assertive quality, and seem to leap off the canvas and towards the viewer.

Carr’s use of color agitates and electrifies these scenes, but also poses a bit of a riddle for the viewer. When sandy paint and vigorous brushwork combine to create particularly craggy surfaces, exact hues and shades can be difficult to pinpoint. A close look at Saddle Up reveals that a single green in the field actually takes on two or three different shades as the rough texture creates shadows on the canvas. This three-for-one visual effect becomes complicated by the fact that Carr uses several shades of green paint in his rendering of the field, and then further complicated by occasional streaks of black paint, and even faint flashes of white, subtly nestled among the greens. The real shadows created by the paint’s granular texture play into and against the painted shadows of the horses and figures, teasing the viewer’s ability to discern material and pictorial realities and blurring the boundaries between “real world” and “painting world.” The same forces are at work in the fleshy colors of the sky—with a just perceptible blue underpainting— and create a shimmering effect, although the acrylic paint is in fact completely matte. Integrated into this shuddering landscape, figures, horses, and shadows in equipoise truncate the picture space in a simple, elegant weave.

The brushwork in Carr’s paintings simultaneously animates and orders the scene. In Yellow Field, each visible stroke is essential to the undulating, self- contained balance of the landscape, and yet the whole painting feels immediate and spontaneous. I had come to associate this unstudied, organic quality with Carr’s tiny paintings on blocks of wood, bonbons as he refers to them, which average about three by six inches; achieving this quality at three feet square must be a considerably trickier feat. When I asked if anything came especially naturally to him when painting, Carr remarked, “If anything’s easy, it’s probably wrong,” but admitted that these “big pieces of color,” the bold strokes of orange or yellow or green when rendering a field (as in Yellow Field, or even more so, Brother’s House) felt like “homebase” to him. The challenge, as Carr sees it, is “being able to take that sensibility of color and shape, which is essentially very abstract, and apply it to what you’re seeing, apply it to what you’re experiencing.” As he paints, he balances two primary concerns: maintaining contact with the painting and the landscape itself—not just the visual reality, but the holistic experience of place.

So what do his scenes of Cherry Plain tell us about the place itself?

In each painting, a few simple answers are provided. We have a sense for the hills, fields, and characters: Misery Mountain, Little Egypt, a horse named Pig and another named Luna—all are revealed to us through Carr’s graceful depictions. But these works are most eloquent in their expression of the enduring and everchanging relationship between a person and a place. The warm sense of concord created by the pairs of humans and horses in That One, the looming of the dark oversized creatures in the foregrounds of Spring Grass and Counting, the stormy change in light across the fields of Walking with Pig–each work reads like a firstperson narrative, permeated by memory and feeling. These scenes, painted in a landscape so familiar that Carr joked that even his paintings from France ended up looking like Cherry Plain, offer a privileged view of a place known by heart.

Carr has spent many years in attentive looking—and not merely at a landscape. Carr’s new Cherry Plain works also testify to his loving study of John Constable, in whose Brighton Beach (1824) we find echoes of the luminous palette and transparency of Carr’s Moonscape. We find evidence of his affection for Walter Sickert and Georges Braque as he continues their explorations of surface texture and its animating possibilities for the picture space. We can perceive the influence of Jean Helion, particularly his 1937 essay “Poussin, Seurat and Double Rhythm” in which Helion remarks of Poussin’s pictures, “Once your eye is on a spot, the graduation of its color takes you somewhere else, and you are due for a marvelous voyage that never passes the same way at the same point”1—an observation that leapt into my mind upon first viewing Carr’s Bringing Luna Home and That One, in which the rhythms of color and form direct the eyes through gates, up hillsides, between clouds and back into fields again. Speaking to Carr about these influences, Rembrandt earned perhaps the highest honor: “When you spend time with a Rembrandt, seeing and understanding what that is, then you turn and see the world, and understand the world. It’s space and form, but it’s so much more than that. It’s like a shaft of existence. It confirms you’re alive.” What a task to set yourself as a painter.

“Read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest,” said Carr, quoting from the Book of Common Prayer. These new works by Carr on view in “Being and Place” are perhaps his most intimate narratives to date, and are the products of such efforts and reflections. He has painted in the same studio he’s had there since he was a teenager, where (years later) his children would interrupt him at work. Now, it’s his grandchildren who wander in while he paints. These scenes of Cherry Plain read like precious memories: momentary, sensory, saturated with feeling. They can exist only through decades of being and looking.

1 Jean Helion,

“Poussin, Seurat and Double Rhythm,” in Double Rhythm: Writings about Painting, translated by Deborah Rosenthal, Arcade Publishing, 2014, 48.

Simon Carr

Simon Carr is a painter and printmaker living and working in New York City and Rensselaer County, New York. He received an MFA from Parsons School of Design in 1981, where he studied with Leland Bell, John Heliker, and Paul Resika. Since then, he has exhibited widely at galleries and non-profit spaces. Since 2015 he has been represented by Bowery Gallery in New York City and, more recently, by Alice Gauvin Gallery in Portland, Maine. He teaches Drawing in the Art Foundations program at Borough of Manhattan Community College. More of his work and a complete CV at: simoncarrstudio.com

Alice Gauvin Gallery

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Catalogue © 2023 Alice Gauvin Gallery

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, without written permission of artist and gallery, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.

Catalogue Design by Phoebe Cole

Artwork Photography by John Goodrich

Cover Image: Rolling Fields, acrylic on canvas, 36 x 60 in., 2022-23

Opening Etching:

Landscape Etching 1: Little Egypt, Fall, aquatint and drypoint etching 6 x 8 in., 2023

Landscape Etching 2: Beyond the line, aquatint and drypoint etching 6 x 8 in., 2023

Bio Image: Self Portrait wirh Bucket, acrylic on wood, 33 x 20 in., 2017