The Miller Art Museum’s show of paintings from the Door County Land Trust, which is there until 22 December, is definitely worth at least an hour’s visit because it provides such a range of contrasts in how painters see and work.
Several painters were attracted to the red Sturgeon Bay Ship Canal Pierhead Light at the end of the northern breakwater protecting the entrance of the Sturgeon Bay Ship Canal. It’s a difficult scene to make interesting -- I get out to the south side of the canal once or twice a year with my camera, then typically look around for something interesting in the foreground, shoot the red building, then the lighthouse, shrug it off and drive away.
So I was impressed by Malin Ekman’s image which looks across the canal through a corridor of brightly painted trees and a pathway that carries on with just as much color as the tree trunks. Not for her some unreasonable adherence to representation by dulling down her image with a beige strip resembling sand. She has also divided the canvas into a large square painting of the pierhead light and foghorn and, separated by a strip of gold paint across the canvas, she has painted a slim three-inch high horizontal painting of the canal and breakwater as seen from perhaps half a mile inland. She took on a very familiar -- not to say grossly over-photographed and over-painted -- scene and made it work on her own terms.
All the paintings were supposed to be done at Land Trust’s many locations around the county, although one or two seem to have been “inspired by” rather than painted on location. It’s fascinating to see how differently painters approach landscape, even the same landscape.
Next to the canal property, the Three Springs Nature Preserve in Sister Bay may have been the most popular. Karen Cook painted it as a hot summer afternoon, the colors nearly bleached out by the sun with only a fringe of green surviving the heat -- a feel I have tried for in my photography with not even a hint of success. Pam Murphy, who usually does intriguing images loosely based on vintage photographs and then worked up in layers of paint and other materials including gold leaf, said she found her foray into landscape interesting and enjoyable.
She chose an eye-level view through tree trunks with a white center in the middle distance asking for attention, while the view upward through the leaves reveals a sky done in gold leaf. The result is stunning.
David Kapszukiewicz painted Three Springs late in a July afternoon and came away with a wealth of color. Brigitte Kozma also found rich color in the grasses, autumn trees, the water and a dark blue sky with circling clouds. She worked on canvas wrapped around wide stretchers so the viewer sees two or three inches of the painting when approaching from either side, or presumably also from the bottom and the top of the painting.
Bonnie Paruch admits painting Three Springs partly from memory of a past summer with more water and richer colors that the relatively dry 2012 afforded her. Her rich pastels stand out in the main room of the museum.
Donna Brown picked another popular location, Kangaroo Lake and worked in oil and cold wax on paper for an intriguing textured image.
Lori Beringer didn’t entirely throw representation to the wind in “Crowning Glory,” a mass of wildflowers in the wind against a distant background of field and trees. Like many of the successful paintings here, it is highly evocative rather than offering any detailed description.
Rick Risch concentrated in a section of a large birch trunk with its white bark and black markings in a winter sky when leaves were gone. The large tree, and smaller companions, become studies in texture and color.
In another interesting approach to the landscape, Shan Bryan-Hanson divided her two canvases of Kangaroo Lake with a column of Door County rocks inserted between the stretchers.
Audrey Off was one of the few to include animal life in her painting of an osprey fixing a nest on a platform set on a tall pole near her home. She had watched the ospreys nest in an old electric transmission tower; when it was replaced with the tall steel towers that run from the canal and up Hwy. 42-57, The American Transmission Co., erected a platform for the birds and moved their existing nest. It took two years for the pair to return, and Off captured their next repair work with obvious delight.
Rob Williams, who paints in Gills Rock, has a magnificent large painting looking down to Ellison Bay -- all done in huge blocks of red and yellow foliage in the foreground. The size of his painting and the boldness of his composition work superbly.
The catalog for the show is well designed but the reproductions are muddy -- ruinous for the the paintings whether they rely on bold or subtle colors, detail or commanding fields of color.
