Space of mind
Two painters offer new interpretations of landscape traditions
By Victoria Dalkey -- Bee Art Correspondent

"I am like the earth about twenty-three degrees off, which gives me summer and winter moods, sheds hopes and sprouts them again; what are my hopes; it's hard to tell what an abstract poet wants." --from "Sphere" by A.R. Ammons

It's equally hard to tell what an abstract painter wants, if the painter is Tom Monteith. His large acrylic abstractions at Jay Jay are based in landscape but plunge the viewer into untracked territory that stems from symbolic and private emotional responses to nature. Mixing fluorescent greens and yellows with earth colors, he paints a world in conflict with itself, a world at once radiant and despoiled, a world of benign and malignant competing forces.

Like Ammons, Monteith has summer and winter moods, often simultaneously. "Solar system," a long horizontal painting with sequential yet seemingly unrelated vignettes, unfolds like a Chinese scroll. Moving from screaming, acid greens to earthy tones and gray areas, it keeps your eye moving. But when you reach the end of the journey, you're not sure where you've been.

In "in recline: earth island," Monteith follows a similar format, but the relationships between the areas - choppy off-white waters, a dark sea with a bright yellow vessel emerging from a black wreckage, gray and blue abstract forms - seem a bit more closely related. They form a near narrative, albeit an arcane one. The painting nevertheless reveals a sense of wonder and drama, a mixture of foreboding and the sublime in what might be a contemporary take on the heroic landscapes of Albert Bierstadt.

Powerful forces collide and clash in "orbit," a large vertical canvas with striking passages of orange and blue and a ghostly heaven inhabited by suggestions of figurative forms. It is as if the top half of the picture were hidden by a scrim that if pulled aside would reveal some mystery, though it is impossible to guess what it might be. Similarly enigmatic is the puzzling "concentered blue: oasis," whose title comes from a Wallace Stevens poem.

A dark sense of threat broken by a radiant blue at the center of the canvas informs "in recline: earth island (osiris)." The title refers to the Egyptian god of the underworld whose body was cut up by his evil brother and strewn in all directions before being gathered up and put back together by his wife, Isis. In Monteith's painting, black, which is the color of Osiris, boils up turbulently around the reclining figure of the god whose all-seeing eye emits light and offers hope.

A series of earlier works, more clearly based in landscape, and a pair of plein-air paintings of figures in a wooded gorge near Big Sur round out the show. The small, plein-air paintings make one think of Cezanne in their subtle color and solid cubistic structure, and leave one wishing to see more. While Monteith's large abstractions are ambitious both in scale and complexity, these small works have a refreshing directness missing in some of his larger works. His most recent paintings are demanding and to a certain extent confusing, but they are worth the effort of trying to understand them.
Terry Miura also turns to the landscape in "Arcadia," a show of mostly small oil paintings at Exploding Head Gallery. Miura, who hails from Brooklyn, N.Y., and now lives in Fair Oaks, departs from his earlier paintings of urban cityscapes in these painterly evocations of a nearly pure landscape, encroached upon only slightly by humans.

Avoiding the pitfalls of contemporary impressionism, which too often comes off as sweet and sugary, Miura follows a path more akin to the tonalism of early California painters such as Xavier Martinez and Giuseppe Cadenasso. Using earth colors and a structure based on light and dark tonal variations, he gives us subtle and emotive scenes of foothill vistas and Napa Valley roads.

Evidence of human habitation is limited in Miura's landscapes, faint reminders of transitory dwellers on the land. A barn sits under a romantic twilight sky, a footpath unfolds ribbonlike over rolling green foothills, a road sign and telephone poles flank a highway. Nature itself is the main subject here as Miura concentrates on the atmospheric effects of light and air on the landscape.

There's a meditative, melancholy quality to four small canvases titled "Quiet," which focus on dark, looming trees against silvery evening skies like those that turn suddenly light just before night falls. Silvery, too, are the tones of "Small Vista #2" and "Small Vista #3," with tender, delicate, suggestive colors and forms following a low horizon line stretched out under big skies.

Miura is sensitive to the changes in light as he moves from place to place, giving us a bleak and arid sky over I-5, capturing the ironically lovely rosiness of smoggy Pasadena and the misty blue air surrounding a river oak. He is especially adept at conveying the mysterious beauty of Napa at nightfall in a magical scene of a foggy Highway 29 lined with looming eucalyptus trees at dusk. It's a gem.

Orbit
WHAT: Acrylic paintings by Tom Monteith
WHERE: Jay Jay, 5520 Elvas Ave.
WHEN: 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays, through April 24
INFORMATION: (916) 453-2999