BRATTLEBORO — If you find yourself appreciating the austere beauty of Vermont's mountains and valleys in this pseudo-winter, but are desperate for spring color, search no more.
There is color and form to spare in Myles Danaher's new collection of landscape paintings at the Dianich Gallery in the Hooker Dunham Building. The exhibit will open with an artist's reception on Friday, March 4, from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m.
Curated by Catherine Dianich Gruver with Dan Sherry, the paintings, representing “a little over a year's worth of thought and labor,” flow through three gallery spaces: a front room, a long hall, and a final turn down a shorter gallery, not unlike a meander along your favorite forest path.
Thirty years a painter, Danaher cites a sense of place, history, and atmosphere as the thread binding the whole of 32 paintings and prints in the collection.
In canvases large and small, the artist explores his ongoing search for “finding the tangible relationship of traditional landscape painting and modernist painting,” and, along the way, creating landscapes both familiar and imagined, “that perfect world in which I would like to exist” along with the pure joy of “simply enjoying my conversation with the paint.”
Danaher's attention to vertical shapes, be it as trees (in fact or suggested) or individual brush strokes, each play their part in the architecture of one painting after another.
To name a few: In the first room of the gallery, “Distant Shore” began as a view across Lake Memphremagog and “is a more intellectual painting about spatial relationships, distance and rhythm of tree trunks.” Like many of the paintings in this exhibit, the view across the lake is imbued with a nuance only achieved by knowing, and loving, a place over time.
Familiarity, however, is not passive. In “The Shimmering Lake,” Danaher explores how “the best painting comes out of abstraction, not conception.” Again, verticals frame an oft observed approach to Lake Willoughby from East Burke. Here the artist deconstructs the figurative, abstracting the landscape into horizontal panels: land, lake and sky.
In distinct but cohesive color groups, the painting is “a nod to Fauvism,” a brilliant jigsaw of pointillist-inspired brushstrokes, inviting viewers to infuse the scene with their own sense of this place.
“Birches, Yellow and White,” set at the intersection of the gallery hallways, evokes the winter we have missed in southern Vermont this year. Imagine your last trip through a forest in deep snow, early afternoon. You are there. Realism segues, left to right, into suggestion, not replication, and the making of a new familiar.
Drawing you to gallery's end, “Orange Mountain,” melds spaciousness, theme, and conversation. A murmur of autumnal foreground colors are laid down in filtered brushstrokes, random yet orderly, leading the eye to sky and summit, a congress of deep blues and ebullient oranges.
“At some point you have to let the paint take over,” Danaher confides.
His iconic mountain portrait negotiates the tension between figurative and abstract, and, with it, the free flowing conversation among the paint, the artist, and the observer.
Fittingly, this exhibit ushers in the Vernal Equinox, and will be open through April 15.