perfectly natural

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2001 Alford Park Drive Kenosha, WI 53140-1994 www.carthage.edu/artgallery

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Perfectly Natural featuring the works of Charles Munch, Randall Berndt, Carol Pylant, Ann Worthing, and Matthew Hagemann. Sept. 12-Oct. 13, 2007.

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Page 1: Perfectly Natural

2001 Alford Park DriveKenosha, WI 53140-1994

www.carthage.edu/artgallery

Page 2: Perfectly Natural

Perfectly NaturalCharles Munch, Randall Berndt, Carol Pylant, Ann Worthing and Matthew Hagemann

September 12–October 13, 2007

Page 3: Perfectly Natural

“ 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)

Page 4: Perfectly Natural

“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

Page 5: Perfectly Natural

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”

Page 6: Perfectly Natural

MemoriesOil on canvas13” x 35”

Page 7: Perfectly Natural

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

Page 8: Perfectly Natural

What Nature has to Teach Us: Lumberjack’s LessonAcrylic on panel14” x 12”

Page 9: Perfectly Natural

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

Page 10: Perfectly Natural

SalvationOil on Canvas35 1/8” x 45 7/8”

Page 11: Perfectly Natural

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

Page 12: Perfectly Natural

BlessedOil on linen48” x 42”

Page 13: Perfectly Natural

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

Page 14: Perfectly Natural

Pussy IIIOil on wood panel30” x 36”

Page 15: Perfectly Natural
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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 [email protected]. 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.