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2001 Alford Park DriveKenosha, WI 53140-1994
www.carthage.edu/artgallery
Perfectly NaturalCharles Munch, Randall Berndt, Carol Pylant, Ann Worthing and Matthew Hagemann
September 12–October 13, 2007
“ Me imperturbe, standing at ease in Nature,
Master of all or mistress of all, aplomb in the midst of
irrational things… “
Walt Whitman
CHARLES MUNCHTwo Worlds
Oil on canvas32” x 48”
(left)
MATTHEW HAGEMANNDay’s Beginning
Oil on canvas17” x 41”
(top-middle)
CAROL PYLANTInterlude
Oil on linen48” x 40”(top-right)
ANN WORTHINGSquirrelly
Oil on board18” x 36”
(bottom-middle)
RANDALL BERNDTLynx’s Moon
Acrylic on panel11” x 14”
(bottom-right)
“Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to
the universe?” Despite the “retrospective” nature of our
age, “why should not we have a poetry and philosophy
of insight and not of tradition,” Ralph Waldo Emerson
famously asked at the opening of his 1836 essay Nature.
The five artists in this show, consciously or not, each
follow Emerson’s suggestion, defining their relationship
to nature in unique ways. Three fit in to the Romantic
outlook of Emerson that also informed the Hudson River
School landscapes that began appearing in his own time,
in which human consciousness and nature were seen as
interpenetrating, as evocations of each other, while the
other two rather pointedly stake out different terrain.
Five Views of Nature by Fred Camper
Matthew Hagemann is perhaps the purest Romantic
of the five. He has studied architectural illustration
and worked as an architectural draftsman, and first
began selling prints of his black and white, rectilinearly pre-
cise renditions of famous Chicago buildings in frame shops
and at outdoor art fairs when his architect employer died in
1990. Even though these drawings are not overly personal,
he chose buildings whose “character” he liked. About seven
years ago, he switched from architectural illustration to
nature painting: “I think there’s much more life and spirit in
nature,” Hagemann says. For much of his life, this Chicago-
an has been taking drives into the country, enjoying himself
in “God’s cathedral”—using a term that the painters Church
and Bierstadt would feel at home with. With their quirky
bends and curves and dynamic, almost musical rhythms,
his paintings are perhaps closest to those of Thomas Hart
Benton, and Hagemann knows Benton’s work—but says he
prefers Dali and Hopper.
Starting from photos he takes of landscapes in the flat
Midwest, Hagemann unstraightens some of the lines.
Day’s Beginning shows a lake bathed in the pink of
dawn, the curvy shoreline seemingly cradling the water,
the curves of land and trees echoing in streaks on the
lake’s surface. His curves often collect in little nubs,
never sharp but more acute than the slopes, adding a
peculiarly individual dynamism. This is a landscape of
imagination, of dreams, in which human subjectivity and
nature have become fused. The tree that rises against
the sky in Dream #3 has curves that are matched by
the surrounding landscape and the clouds behind,
lines dancing harmoniously with each other rather than
seeming to collide, varied swoops and slopes creating a
kind of mental swirl that gives a view of nature as being
alive, not as an entity separate from humans but as
something part of our inner lives.
Matthew Hagemann
Dream #3Oil on canvas13” x 35”
MemoriesOil on canvas13” x 35”
Berndt grew up on a family farm 50 miles north of
Madison, and his childhood spent in nature—“a kind of
a Huckleberry Finn lifestyle, wandering hither and yon,
fishing, building little forts”—remains a key inspiration.
“Nature is my great teacher. My memories are not
so much of people but of landscape, of patterns on
trees, rocks and water.” But he lived in a world that’s
“completely vanished” today, the close-knit community of
his youth now “oddly fragmented” between factory farms,
a new Amish community, and the huge new homes of
exurbanites. From knowing nothing about art as a youth,
he was painting “abstract Rothkoesqe clouds” in graduate
school and then biomorphic forms, until, partly inspired
by Wisconsin painters such as Munch, John Wilde, and
Tom Uttech, he switched to his present figurative style.
Berndt is the first to point out that he’s not a photorealist,
and in citing as a key inspiration a quote from Caspar
David Friedrich about “seeing your picture first” with your
“spiritual” rather than “bodily” eye, he places himself
firmly in the Romantic tradition. Writing in the Wisconsin
Academy Review, Richard Long suggests that Berndt’s
painting is kin to “conjuring,” and with the inwardness
of his light and his mysterious groupings of objects
he does seem to be suggesting magical invocations of
another world, each of his objects infused with an iconic
suggestiveness. At the same time, his recent works
have a clear theme: civilization and nature, including the
most basic instinctual nature within us, are different and
possibly incompatible realms, a theme suggested even
in the title of Instinct and Shelter. A nude man sits on a
log whose cut face is flat but whose huge ridges suggest
wildness; before him is a precisely honed miniature
house he has apparently made, while the hanging deer in
the warm light of the rougher tent suggests something a
bit wilder, and the dark background trees are wilder still.
Lynx’s MoonAcrylic on panel11” x 14”
The Hudson River School painters rarely showed
nature as totally wild. Whether offering a balance
between the wild and the settled landscape, as in
Thomas Cole’s The Oxbow (1836), or showing the
intrusion of a railroad, or simply including tiny figures
in wilderness scenes, these contrasted the products of
human civilization with wilderness, showing them as quite
different entities. This point is also made in different ways
by Randall Berndt and Charles Munch, two Wisconsin
artists who are also friends.
Randall Berndt
What Nature has to Teach Us: Lumberjack’s LessonAcrylic on panel14” x 12”
Childhood experiences of nature remain key for
Munch as well. Growing up in the old St. Louis
suburb of Webster Groves, he remembers the
wild unoccupied areas in the middle of blocks, “kind
of neglected backyards,” where he and his friends
played. Even more important were childhood summers
spent in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin. “It wasn’t organized
rectilinearly,” Munch noticed early, unlike Webster Groves’s
grid. “I had the freedom to spend whole days wandering
over this little kingdom.” His realistic landscape paintings
of the 70s led to a crisis in the early 80s. “I was trying to
understand a lot of dichotomies I felt in my life, between
emotion and intellect, representation and abstractions,
the human world and the natural world, artists and
everyone else. I didn’t feel I could express my feelings
about landscape to my satisfaction with realism.” Early
Renaissance painting, and the power of its intense colors—
in contrast to Raphael, where “the color has started to
be subsumed in the representational efforts”—was also
important, as were also the children’s book illustrations and
comic books of his childhood; he had been impressed by
the variety of color shades possible on a comic book cover,
as opposed to the inside.
In Munch’s paintings, the clash between the wild and the
civilized is every bit as strong as it is in Berndt’s. Two Worlds
shows a group of cemetery monuments in a clearing, trees
in the background. The monuments are largely rectilinear
and Euclidean, but betwixt and amongst them, a group of
deer is crossing from right to left. The deer seem oblivious
to the monuments’ presence, and the contrast is almost
humorous. In Salvation, a couple seems to be carrying a
stretcher out of a forest, and on it lays a deer—perhaps
wounded, perhaps dead. There’s a contrast within the
couple too: the woman, in a torn dress, stands on the forest
floor, while the man, a bit more civilized looking, walks on
meadow. The forest behind the woman seems dense and
wild, while a plane flies at the upper left. Munch’s schematic
style, with broad areas of solid color that have a faint
picturebook, even coloring book, quality, contributes to the
speculative, even philosophical nature of his enterprise.
Less than convincing representations of how civilization
and nature really look, they present symbolic interactions
between different layers of wild and tamed, encouraging the
viewer to her or his own thoughts on the subjects.
Road KillOil on canvas32” x 32”
Charles Munch
SalvationOil on Canvas35 1/8” x 45 7/8”
Like Munch, Carol Pylant has made the transition from
relatively realistic landscapes to a more symbolic
style in the last decade, and with a similar gain in
speculative questioning. Her recent paintings with animals
in landscapes have a strangely surrealist aura, tiled
floors adding a suggestion of great depth. In Interlude,
a peacock copied from a photo she took struts across a
checkerboard floor. Early Renaissance archways behind
open out onto water and distant land, and in one archway a
bird flies. The viewer might not guess that she was reading
Dante’s Inferno at the time, but her comment that it’s not
clear if the peacock is trying to get in or out makes sense,
and one in general feels a heavy symbolic weight invested
in the two birds, the floor, and the contrasting nature
with its soft-edged hues, making the contrast between
nature and culture even sharper visually than in Berndt or
Munch. That the symbols are not specific, and the contrast
between the rigid geometry of the architecture and the
softness of nature, seem to break with traditional Romantic
painting—it seems as if there is more than a single unified
consciousness at work here, and the painting is as much
about disconnections as about unities. The clashing worlds
of Berndt’s and Munch’s paintings, by contrast, are unified
by a consistent painterly style throughout.
Pylant, too, had formative early encounters with nature.
Growing up in economically disadvantaged circumstances
in the urban chaos of 1960s Detroit, she remembers the
contrast with summers on her grandmother’s Tennessee
farm—and saw nature as an escape. She was impressed
in high school by the 17th-century Dutch paintings at the
Detroit Institute of Arts, for “the way light was dealt with,
the believability of space, the detail,” and their influence can
be seen in some of her earlier work. In the recent paintings,
the contrast between the Renaissance style tiled floors
with their geometrical precision and the soft landscapes
in the background is most impressive. The view through
the arches, too, recalls the distant views toward infinity of
Caspar David Friedrich, though Pylant says he’s not much
of an influence. There’s some of the “distillation of light in
space” from her “longest-running influence,” Vermeer. Her
spaces, indeed, seem suffused with a mystical light, the
ubiquitousness of which is heightened by the framing floors
and archways -- which also somewhat break with that light.
Pylant’s free-floating symbolism parallels Munch’s
ambiguities. There are two dogs in Blessed, one inside
the aches seemingly looking out and the other outside,
beside the water, looking in. They suggest different human
owners, and different positions in life. The knowledge
that one dog is hers and the other, recently deceased,
was her mother’s, and that the painting was inspired by
the unexpected death of a friend, provides only one set of
possible interpretations.
SempreOil and Acrylic on panel48” x 39”
Carol Pylant
BlessedOil on linen48” x 42”
Ann Worthing presents nature somewhat differently
from the other four artists. Her childhood
experiences of nature include time spent on
family farms, and also time spent with the family’s pets,
including the “menagerie” her brothers kept while she
was growing up in Wharton, Texas. Unlike the bright,
seductive colors of the other four, Worthing’s are mixed
with their complements. One inspiration is the paintings
of Giorgio Morandi, which she discovered in the late 80s;
another could be winters in her hometown: “Everything
turned brown, and it was really monotonous. The land is
very flat, and I learned to pay attention to subtle changes.
I remember noticing different shades in the brown grass,
and the way the grass took on colors from anything
that might be around.” Top Dog shows a pet she once
owned, his back indeed arched and his stance direct
and confrontational, but he’s painted in a pale cream
that doesn’t stand out that much from the yellowish
background. The cat in Pussy III seems drawn into himself,
the way cats often are; self sufficient, his eyes seem to be
staring out, but it’s not clear if they really are, and his pose
is symmetrical, statuesque. His fur is paler than the green
behind or the turquoise of the pool below, but it also feels
as if each color can be seen in the other.
Worthing says that one reason for avoiding highly
saturated colors is that she wants the paintings to change
with the changing light around them. They indeed have a
modesty, a lack of pride in themselves as paintings or in
the objects they contain, that suggests an artist even less
assertive about her role than the others. But if respect for
nature means anything, it should mean knowing that it is
not our property, nor is it even given to us to completely
understand, and Worthing’s stance suggests a respect
for her subjects as well as an openness to the changing
environments they might be seen in. Nature is not a
creature of her inner consciousness, but something that
exists out there in the world, and changes in nature are
not simply changes in our inner awareness, but also can
reflect changes in that outer world.
Top DogOil on board36” x 30”
Ann Worthing
Pussy IIIOil on wood panel30” x 36”
Special Homecoming Hours: Friday,October5•10a.m.–4p.m.
Saturday,October6•1–4p.m.
Sunday,October7•12:30–3p.m.
Regular Gallery Hours: Tuesday–Friday•10a.m.–3p.m.
Thursdayevening•6-8p.m.
Saturday•1-4p.m.
For more information, please contact Diane
Levesque at (262) 551-5853 or send an email
to dlevesque@carthage.edu. To learn more
about the H. F. Johnson Gallery of Art please
visit www.carthage.edu/dept/art/gallery.
Fred Camper is an artist, and a writer and lecturer on art and film,
who lives in Chicago. His Web site is www.fredcamper.com.
Fred Camper
Randall Berndt is represented by Grace Chosy Gallery in Madison,WI.
Matthew Hagemann is represented by Portals,Ltd. Gallery in Chicago, IL.
and Monforts Fine Art in Racine, WI.
Charles Munch is represented by Tory Folliard in Milwaukee, WI. and
Grace Chosy Gallery in Madison,WI.
Carol Pylant is represented by Ann Nathan Gallery in Chicago, IL.,
Grace Chosy Gallery in Madison,WI. and Peltz Gallery in
Milwaukee, WI.
Ann Worthing is represented by Packer Schopf Gallery in Chicago,IL.