Don Resnick: Earth, Sea and Sky

Dunes and Sand 45x45

There’s something magical about a landscape painting, something enchanting—not casually so, but in the full, rich sense of that word. It’s a part of what we were in danger of forgetting, in twentieth century art’s headlong rush toward the new. Not that landscape painting was ever really left behind—witness the luminous work of Don Resnick, a painter whose eye has never wavered in over forty years in its attention to the natural world around him. It’s rather that what we glibly accepted to be the advance guard of the art world, swept  up in the giddy gallop of a false sense of “progress,” failed to pay very much attention to it. Now that we have left the twentieth century behind, there’s room, perhaps, for a more expansive vision.

The sense of magic, I suspect, comes from what landscape painting has to tell us about our humanity. We stand in front of a picture whose four edges constrain out attention to the natural world in a very particular way. Because it is thus contained, and because its scale allows us to assume a different sense of our own scale than we do when confronted with a natural scene, we feel perhaps more comfortable about measuring ourselves against it. Thus a mountain, or an ocean, no matter how awesome in life, takes on human scale; and, like Alice, we are invited to slip through a special tunnel of consciousness created for us by the artist, and into a new and different perception of the world. 

Resnick’s paintings invite us down into that tunnel with a path, a shore line, the ridge of a cliff… Without even a thought - save for those who wish to analyze such things—the eye us readily reduced from its objective place outside the painting right into its depths, and the viewer finds himself engaged not merely in the picture’s story, the particularities of the depicted scene, but more importantly in the artist’s process. As Resnick told the poet Louis Simpson, of his painting: “It’s always something I have seen. I have to experience it.”

The experience for the artist, comes with the act of painting, which is no more nor less than a “realization” of what it is he sees - which otherwise shares the illusory nature of all reality: it comes, it goes, it changes constantly, from moment to moment. The growth of a tree might be hard to measure. But a wave breaks, and suddenly the ocean’s face is changed. A fractional shut of the sun, and nothing is as it was a moment before. The painter’s practice allows him to fix things as he goes along, while at the same time revealing the process to us as process. Our job, as viewers, is to participate in his act of making it real, over and over, recreating the landscape each time we look at it.  It’s a physical effort, if we do it right and the effort itself makes us more aware of who we are and where we stand in relation to the world.

Thus Resnick’s painting is, as much as anything, about discovering presence and location in the world—not only that of the physical objects that so mysteriously surround us, but our own. It’s something that we so often take for granted in our daily lives tat it seems magical when it happens. A view we may have thought to have seen a hundred times reveals itself un sudden clarity, and we have that warm, familiar feeling: ah, now I see it. And scenes that we have never laid eyes on expand our vision of the world.

What gives a special glow to this magic is the quality of luminosity that pervades this work. It’s a quality that Resnick inherits from centuries of earlier landscape painting. We think, of course, of the Romantic heritage—of Constable and Turner, for example, and Caspar David Friedrich; but also of the American Impressionists; and painters of the twentieth century like Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Arthur Dove. Resnick’s work is evidence of the continuing vitality of these traditions, and of the fact that there is more gold to be mined yet in these veins.

But the light in these paintings, for me, is eventually a metaphor for the mystery that lies beyond everything we see. So much about our world, and the visible, Resnick’s worm is also profoundly evocative of the invisible that seems in some way to give substance and balance and meaning to everything we see. I suspect this is what the Romantics meant by Truth, when they equated it with Beauty. We also have a name for it, to which we have been learning in recent years to return, long after the death of God (remember painting was pronounced dead, too!) and the pervasive spread of rational materialism: we call it spirit.

There are a number of paintings, amongst this newest work, which slyly substitute the verticals of myriad trees for the horizon of traditional landscape painting. The light, in these paintings, seems to emanate from behind the forest that confronts us: we seem to be peering through the bars of the material world toward an unknown and mysterious light source, which attracts our eye and tempts it to follow a more difficult path—a path not conveniently laid out for us by the artist, but which we are constrained to discover for ourselves, between the trees, in a true collaboration with the painter.

Landscape painting, we discover, can still offer adventures for the mind and eye.

Peter Clothier