Opinion: Intimate, Not Epic, Landscapes

Those who have been watching "American Visions," Robert Hughes's masterly overview of American art on PBS, will almost certainly feel differently about the next exhibit of American landscape painting that comes their way - which might just be "On Site" at the Lizan-Tops Gallery in East Hampton.

For the artists of the young America, which lacked history or heroes, Mr. Hughes argues that it was the spectacular untouched landscape that came to represent the nation. And from the moment the nation's citizens saw those panoramas of untamed splendor by Alfred Bierstadt or by Thomas Cole and the Hudson River painters, they, too, have remained obsessed with the American landscape.

But now the wilderness is tamed, the peaks are trod, the Grand Canyon has been "looked out," and the awesome unknown is featured on a million calendars.

Domestic Scenery

Landscape painting has lost its epic scale, too. The monumental vistas, though they may remain, have been traded for the domestic scenery of field and hillside. This can be seen in the East End landscapes in the Lizan-Tops show, although here one still has the grandeur of the South Fork broad, flat fields and soaring skies.

Ralph Carpentier emphasizes these distinctive features by holding the focal point of each painting - a narrow horizontal strip containing trees, hedges, houses, and barns - in a vise of sky and field. Particularly when those skies are filled with clouds, as in "View From Conklin House II," they almost feel as if they will fall and crush you.

Intimate Scale

David Paulsen has a very interesting group of farmscapes. They, too, have big skies and deep fields anchored by trees and hedges, but they are painted with an amber glow, as if they had been hanging in a smoke-filled room for many years. This has the effect of focusing one's attention on the structural composition of hedge and hill and the division of fields.

All five painters represented in the exhibit treat the sky differently, but Mr. Paulsen, in "Tiska's Farm, Treeline," has a wind-tossed sky with touches of pink, gray, and robin's-egg blue that is particularly comforting.

Francesco Bologna's paintings glow with a love of the East End and people's place in it. Not for him the distant vista, the sweeping sky - what attracts him are old barns, a peeling boat up on chocks, rusting farm machinery, a few twisted trees. He records the intimate details of a way of life that is vanishing almost as fast as the untamable wilderness did.

Simon Parkes's upbeat small scenes of beaches, harbors, and bays with bounding boats and scudding clouds are also on an intimate scale.

Disappearing Beauty

Ty Stroudsberg's paintings are looser, more Impressionistic, and freer with their colors. Swaths of lilac, soft yellow, pink, and peach are anchored by the dark, structural shapes of barns or trees.

There is one grabbingly uplifting painting as you enter the gallery. It is called "Statice Field," but its vernal colors could be the wild lupine, spring rocket, mustard, daisy, coltsfoot, and violet of those splendid brief days when winter is gone and the summer traffic is still a distant nightmare.

Speaking of the South Fork landscape, an introduction to the exhibit says, "Because so many of these precious sites are succumbing to development, these paintings may be regarded as historical documents of the beauty that is disappearing from the East End."

And, sure enough, when you look at the paintings, you find that out of the 35 or so on display, there is not one, not one, that doesn't show the grimy thumb print of human encroachment: the waterways have boats and jetties, the land has barns, tracks, power lines, old machinery, the hard edges of cultivated fields, and the beaches have old snow fences and tracks through the dunes.

If the change in landscape painting is anything to go by, we should fervently support all efforts to protect our countryside. Otherwise, the next landscape show we visit may feature a begonia in a windowbox.