Landscapes done right at Gallery McCollum

BOBBIE ALLEN

I am not a fan of landscape painting. Its roots are in “the

picturesque,” a fairly modern movement in art that attempted to

capture the sublime qualities of the great outdoors through big,

dramatic canvases.

At one time it was radical, attempting to shrug off stuffy,

artificial classical paintings for wild, untamed and unorganized

nature. But in time, it became stilted, cliched and exhausted.

There’s lots of tedious repetition in landscape painting. “Oh, look,”

you think when you see one, “a beautiful sunset on a beautiful hill

by a beautiful river.” Yawn. They might as well have been painted by

a machine (and sometimes are), and they add nothing to the vast

richness of experience that might wash over you if you just walked

out the gallery door and found a real sunset.

So I was genuinely surprised, and nearly hopping with pleasure,

when I walked into Gallery McCollum (206 N. Coast Highway) and found

the work of Caroline Zimmerman on the walls.

Here’s a painter who knows what she’s doing. Her canvases hearken

back to the beginnings of landscape, to its Romantic days -- with a

capitol “r” -- when paintings of trees and hillsides were carefully

crafted compositions designed to take you out of everyday experience,

to transport you into something sublimely beautiful.

I practically ran up to “The Third of November,” (30x40, oil on

linen), and wished immediately that I could run right through it into

the landscape it depicts.

It’s a dream vineyard, a rustic hillside with the idealistic light

of, yes, early November tinting every twig with pure gold. This is a

Nov. 3 that nobody will ever really experience, except through a

painting; it’s the sort of thing that Oscar Wilde meant when he said

that life imitates art instead of vice versa. When you think of

Tuscany, “The Third of November” is what you really mean.

And Tuscany it is. Zimmerman is from Southern California (she

studied at the Laguna Beach School of Art), but spends part of the

year in Italy. She has obviously studied both her craft and her

locale carefully. You can see her knowledge in the many layers of

paint and skillful use of glazing. “The Third of November” has rich

red underpaint, the color used under gilding, and it helps the golds

and greens crystallize on the linen. She makes the underpaint work

hard: It peaks out on the top of the distant hills, functioning as

their outline.

The point of view in the painting is down, over the tops of the

rows of grape vines, rustic roofs here and there, at that precise

moment when the light is just so -- transmuting everything it touches

into something more lovely than it actually is. That is art.

But for all the layering, I fell in love with Zimmerman’s skies.

Every turning leaf is articulated with its own shadow; but

Zimmerman’s sky is a buttery yellow, thin, with obvious brush marks,

each dab remaining where the artist put it, showing the width of the

brush itself. It’s a half-thought sky, far more interesting than

blue.

There is blue in this painting: blue in the evergreen shrubbery.

Yellow where there should be blue, blue where there should be green,

yet all is harmonious and shining. These are the tricks light plays,

what we mean by “quality” of light, a borrowed glory.

Of course, this is where landscape as a genre began to go wrong --

its one-upmanship on nature became cartoonish. But Zimmerman stays

sharp, interpretive. She has a wiser eye than ours, an intelligence.

A light-hearted composition on the opposite wall, “Ode to M. Parrish”

(24x36), takes on Parrish’s famous turquoise blue sky and reclining

classical beauties draped in Grecian robes. The bathing pool is empty

and the only maiden left is made of stone.

Parrish, perhaps, was the last Romantic in oil, and endless

reproductions of his work killed any depth it may have contained. It

was disappointing to read that Zimmerman sells prints of these

canvases. Their translucence and grandeur will be absent in a print,

and without that sublime technique they might fade into commonness.

“View of La Torre” (28x14), for instance, is a simple cobblestone

street, a typical picturesque subject. What makes this an outstanding

painting is Zimmerman’s set of choices as an artist, something only

present in the original canvas. Its long, thin shape keeps us

confined to the street. The gloss on its glazed surface suggests the

of the walls of the ancient buildings. The clock tower that straddles

the street is frozen -- like the town -- at about 5:35: then, now,

and forever. We peek through its arch at the timeless Italian hills

beyond, at the vocabulary of greens and yellows and reds we know are

rooftops and trees. It would be a shame to miss the “presentness” of

this sort of skill, to move around the front of the canvas and see

the brushwork and glaze application. But such is the

commercialization of art. It will still be a quaint street, even in a

print.

Does this mean that Zimmerman’s Tuscan paintings are nostalgic?

Yes, certainly they are. You can’t paint bougainvillea-covered

cottage doors without being nostalgic. But they are not jaded or

saccharine -- they have the virtue of being beautiful, and that is

about as forward-looking as you can ask for these days.

* BOBBIE ALLEN can be reached at [email protected].