Finding Fresh Views in Door County

Moon over water imagery always makes me think of horrible paintings on black velvet at gas stations along the Pacific Coast Highway in Laguna Beach. Not quite sure why. So if you had told me about Bonnie Paruch’s painting of “Moonlight on Rowley’s Bay” you would have aroused by skepticism. The work is stunning, as you can see from her Web site on P. 2. (Funny, if you click on the image it comes up with the caption "Rowley’s Bat Moon") 

It’s pretty easy to see why this is so good. She cheats. At least from a photographer’s viewpoint. She builds up the paint and turns the moon’s reflection into edgy pools of bright color on the canvas. It’s a very tough act for mere photography to follow.

It’s also not something that can be done in watercolor. The oil-paint-wielding landscape painters have dominated the Plein Air festival that the Peninsula School of Art has sponsored for 6 years; only two participants this year were doing watercolor. 

Painting has also become much looser, much bolder, around the county, I think. (See Nancy Keyser’s description of her work, in watercolor, below.)  Both Paruch, who has just opened her own gallery in Ellison Bay, and Tom Nachreiner, a Plein Art mainstay from Delafield, paint with power. Tom had a painting of a seagull on the beach at Edgewood Orchard over the summer.  As a cliche of Sunday painters, a seagull painting might fall just a notch or two below a sailboat passing a lighthouse in a ranking of Door County cliches, but Nachreiner’s is a strong painting that had me debating with someone in gallery over which one of us should be able to take it home. Unfortunately, neither of us had our checkbooks. 

The painting looks like late afternoon sun on Lake Michigan, with waves piling up in warm whites and yellows  as they prepare to assault the beach. The bright color in the foreground is backed by surly dark water stretching to the horizon. The gull, alone on the beach, struts in front of the wave as if he owns the place. Indeed, the water appears to parted just before him to make his stroll an easy one.

The handling of the paint makes it work. (Also see his ducks in images 13-18 on the Edgewood Orchard site which I think are far more interesting as paintings than the images of ducks he displays under Wildlife on his own site. 


Rolf Olson, whose Shades of Gray photographs have been appearing on Facebook, takes a  decidedly different approach -- he reduced his images, which are of simple and well defined subjects like a tree trunk, to just shades of gray. 

The idea doesn’t sound very interesting, but I like the images a lot. My thinking here  reminds me of the French saying, “Yes, I know it works in practice, but does it work in theory?”  You can see his images on Facebook and he hopes to find a wall somewhere in the county to hang some prints this winter. I look forward to seeing the prints.

Door County is a gorgeous place. For an artist, that can be a source of frustration -- where do you turn for a fresh picture? Cave Point is rarely the answer.