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Old Windfall
1981-1982
Oil on Canvas, 96”x120”
Neil Welliver
Courtesy of Alexandre Gallery
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| Neil Welliver at work in the field |
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| Neil Welliver's studio palette |
I'm a fan of well-done crime shows. Lately, I've gotten hooked on Amazon's “Bosch.” It's about an L.A. Detective with strong principles but who doesn't always follow the rules. The detective, Hieronymous Bosch—named after the 15th century painter from the Netherlands—is played by actor Titus Welliver. Somewhere in my web surfing I came across a curious fact. Titus Welliver is the son of well-known Maine landscape painter Neil Welliver.
Neil Welliver (1929-2005) is one of my favorite painters. His work is realistic yet graphic in a posterized sort of way. His paintings of deep woods evoke for me the feeling of a long hike through a forest thick with hemlock and strewn with moss-covered glacial erratics. When I see a painting like the one at the top of this post, I can almost smell the ferns.
Here's what Wikipedia says about the artist:
Welliver was born in Millville, Pennsylvania. He graduated from the Philadelphia College of Art (now part of the University of the Arts) and then received an MFA from Yale University. At Yale, he studied with the abstract artists Burgoyne Diller and Josef Albers, whose theories on color were influential. Welliver taught at Cooper Union from 1953 to 1957 and at Yale from 1956 to 1966. In 1966, he began teaching at, and eventually became chairman of the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Fine Art, from which he retired in 1989.
While teaching at Yale, Welliver's style evolved from abstract color field painting to the realistic transcription of small-town scenes in watercolor. In the early 1960s he went to Maine, where he began painting figures outdoors, the large oil paintings often focusing on his sons canoeing or female nudes bathing. In 1970 he moved permanently to Lincolnville, and by the mid 1970s the figure as subject had given way to the exclusive study of landscape.
His mature works, often as large as 8 by 10 feet, are at once richly painted abstractions and clear representational images of intimate Maine landscapes, taking as their subjects rocky hills, beaver houses, tree stumps, and rushing water, occasionally opening out to blue cloud-laden skies. Carrying his equipment on his back, Welliver hiked into the woods to make plein-air sketches. His equipment-laden backpack weighed 70 pounds, and included eight colors of oil paint: white, ivory black, cadmium red scarlet, manganese blue, ultramarine blue, lemon yellow, cadmium yellow, and talens green light. These plein-air studies usually took about 9 hours, and were painted in 3 hour increments, after which time the light would change too much to continue. Welliver insisted that he was uninterested in trying to copy the exact colors of objects, desiring instead to find "a color that makes it look like it is, again, surrounded by air.”
He often painted out of doors in winter, and enjoyed the crystal quality of the air and luminosity created by light reflecting off snow, but acknowledged that the process was not easy:
"Painting outside in winter is not a macho thing to do. It's more difficult than that. To paint outside in the winter is painful. It hurts your hands, it hurts your feet, it hurts your ears. Painting is difficult. The paint is rigid, it's stiff, it doesn't move easily. But sometimes there are things you want and that's the only way you get them."
Welliver later expanded some of the outdoor studies into large paintings in the studio, painting 4 to 7 hours a day, meticulously starting the canvases in the upper left-hand corner and finishing in the lower right. If the finished paintings were vibrantly painted, containing "an emotional intensity that goes beyond the ordinary limits of realism", they also tended to be emotionally sombre.
Welliver died of pneumonia in Belfast, Maine, near his home in Lincolnville.
Here's a 30-minute video of Neil Welliver making an outdoor sketch and then moving to the studio to paint a larger version. (Can't see the video? Here's the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ht_5csln19k) I find it fascinating that he used the old charcoal-and-pounce method for transferring his drawing to a large canvas.
Son Titus learned initially from his father and then studied art at Bennington College. Although he doesn't say in so many words, I believe his father was as strict with him regarding technique as N.C. Wyeth was with his son, Andrew. In this interview, he talks about his father and painting. (Can't see the video? Here's the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0n_ihljNygQ )
Titus' painting style, although similar to his father's in that values are reduced and shapes flattened, tends to have an even more contemporary feeling. Uncluttered by unnecessary detail, his paintings distill the landscape into a few, evocative shapes. Here's an example:
Concerto No.5 in F Minor
Acrylic on Canvas, 20" x 20"
Titus Welliver
Courtest of artrep-dg.com
