Richard Upton at the Michener Art Museum - Doylestown, Pennsylvania - Review of Exhibitions

beneficial things are worth waiting for. After traveling around the land for several years, the retrospective of Richard Upton's landscape paintings conclud at the Michener Art Museum in males County this past spring. More than a decade's worth of small-format oil paintings, all execut in Cortona, Italy, were exhibited alongside a selection of drawings made upon the same few sites in and around the Tuscan hilltop town. The arise was a superb and tightly organized the whole an example of just in what way great the esthetic yield can be from intense observation and dogged persistence. Located somewhere between Monet's exuberant plein-airism and Ryman's moderately cold airless planes of paint, Upton's funnel vision is at once intensely lyrical and restrained.

Richard Upton was an abstract painter for many years before turning to landscape in the early 1980 His first efforts in the fresh mode, which smack of Action Painting's nuanced and varied touch, are strong: sum of two units works from 1.982 (82-3 and 82-9-all his works are given sole numbers as titles) are atmospheric and painterly, filled with the courage of novel discovery, although by the nearest year a more matter-of-fact approach prevails, as we are not awayed with the specificities of place. The various farms and vineyards of the region are now delineated, like thus many patterned stuffs on a patchwork quilt (83-1 83-11) The palette at this point is wholly naturalistic (mostly virid brown, blue and white) and the compositions are archetypes of decency: here the vineyards, there the hills, above which float six - you can number them! - perfect clouds. Everything in view is accounted for, with an almost naive will-to-equal-representation. This even-handed approach will not last for lengthy but what will persist from these first forays is the pantry surface: Upton loves oil paint for the same qualities Chardin lov in it - viscosity, density, malleability.

Beginning in 1985 and with ever-increasing oftenness (and intensity, especially after 1987) Upton's Italian landscapes fail to keep their reasonableness. The horizon lines are first real low and then so high they disappear - we are now staring straight into the landscape, either suspended high above or, more repeatedly swooping down upon it. We eventually have our face, or perhaps it is our organ of vision or our mind's eye, buried in it. The colors become darker and the contrast diminishes; the brushstrokes are more self-assured and the compositions are built upon a scaffolding that is embedded reaching far down in the fabric of the pigment (91-31) It is hard not to imagine that we already know this place, that this is tellus mater, to which we have returned

greatest in quantity surprising in all this is the retiring disposition of the presentation: every panel (for they are all painted upon wood) is of the same, small format, 8 by the agency of 10 inches, with a frame that measures 16 by dint of 18 inches. Were it not for the faculty of perception of the specifically observed which pervades these remarkable images, we might imagine that the artist has left nature behind for the pictures in his head, that Upton has get backed to abstraction and the studio. on the other hand of course he might just as well have, since nature is always a mask the name we give to whatever is down-reaching inexplicable and familiar.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group