CANVAS – September 2012

by Britta Konau

Painters Jaap Eduard Helder, George Lloyd, and Robert S. Neuman work in abstractions, and yet the world—and the artists’ intuitive responses to it—deeply inform their images. Their works are profoundly personal art devoted to investigations of sensory and emotional experience.

Jaap Eduard Helder

Jaap Eduard Helder was born in the Netherlands, where he studied Latin, Greek, German, French, and English in school. His interest in making art was galvanized by seeing the abstract-expressionist paintings of Dutch artist Karel Appel (1921–2006). Helder does not hold a formal degree in studio art, but he has taken classes and continues his study of other artists. He lived in many countries, including Ireland and Israel, before settling in Maine in 1974. He currently resides in Machias. Helder’s works are in private and corporate collections. He is represented by the Turtle Gallery in Deer Isle and the Flat Iron Gallery in Portland, and has also shown at the gallery of the Maine Farmland Trust in Belfast.

Initially, Helder worked in a representational style to capture the industrial character of the Dutch town he grew up in. His worldwide travels later in life occasioned a series of what he calls “neo-primitive paintings” that were inspired by indigenous art. Close study of abstract artists, including Willem de Kooning (1904–1997), John Hultberg (1922–2005), and George Lloyd (b. 1945), eventually encouraged Helder to find his own expressionist style.

The natural beauty of the downeast landscape informs Helder’s recent work. He describes these paintings as “intuitive improvisations on nature.” Working from a black underlayer of gesso, the artist applies paint in nuanced colors and shapes using a variety of approaches, including wiping and scratching into fresh layers. Light-filled openings materialize alongside deep recesses into space. These nonrepresentational spatial illusions are “magical, secret spaces that you can get into,” the artist says. Still, the viewer is always pulled back to the active surface, and into the awareness of looking at nothing but paint and its possibilities. The relatively small size of Now’s the Time belies the abundant energy and grand gestures it contains. While inspired by nature, it does not represent it. For Helder, it describes “a colorful, dynamic world that hovers between the abstract and the representational.”

Motivated by his earlier interest in man-made machines, Helder now also photographs the time-worn surfaces of fishing boats and abandoned cars in extreme close-ups, which turns the images into stunningly beautiful abstracts. In both mediums, the artist lets sensations and feelings guide him. “My works are all stories about the land and the sea, but this is storytelling without words,” he says.

George Lloyd

Born in Massachusetts, George Lloyd received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and his MFA from what was then called the Yale School of Art and Architecture. He received grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation in 1994 and 2006, and he has had four solo exhibitions at museums that include the Davison Art Center at Wesleyan University (1983) and the Portland Museum of Art (2006). Lloyd’s work is in the permanent collections of several university art museums, in addition to the Ogunquit Museum of American Art and the Portland Museum of Art. He is represented by ACME Fine Art in Boston and often shows at Greenhut Galleries in Portland and the George Marshall Store Gallery in York.

While living in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Lloyd initially worked in a semi-abstract figurative mode characterized by multiple dark outlines and curvaceous shapes. After switching to geometric abstraction, the artist created complex compositions anchored by beautiful color harmonies. These paintings took on an increasingly concrete character with the inclusion of the schematic shapes of houses and other architectural suggestions. (The artist’s father and brother are both trained architects, and Lloyd has executed drawings for them.) Since moving to Maine in 1984, the artist has practiced what he calls “an impure form of abstraction that contains qualities of the real world.”

Lloyd’s gestural paintings are filled with light and atmosphere. In many works, lines continue to trace architectural armatures suggestive of space and occasionally inhabited by figures. Ultimately, though, Lloyd derives his inspiration from the materials he works with: oil paint, watercolors, or graphite on canvas, muslin-covered plywood, and paper. His compositions fill all available space but carefully consider and respect the edges as well.

As in many of Lloyd’s paintings, Crepuscular Reverie indefinably suggests an interior space suffused by exterior light. A twilight daydream, the muted, pastel colors and atmospheric background evince a romantic sensitivity. Individual areas of color and space advance and recede, adding to the evident liveliness of his passionate applications of paint. In less skilled hands, the painting might have collapsed into indistinct composition, but Lloyd’s reliance on classical proportions from Western antiquity has a tempering effect. “There is a little bit of retro about me,” he says

Robert S. Neuman

After receiving his BA and MFA from California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland (now called California College of the Arts), Robert S. Neuman was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship in 1953 to continue his studies in Stuttgart, Germany. Three years later, he also received a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to study in Barcelona. Neuman has taught at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University and at Keene State College in New Hampshire, among other institutions. An exhibition of work executed between 1972 and 1990 is currently on view at Keene State College’s Carroll House Gallery. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and many other museums across the country. Neuman is represented by the Sunne Savage Gallery in Winchester, Massachusetts, and the Allan Stone Gallery in New York City. Redfield Artisans Gallery in Northeast Harbor also shows his work.

Over his 60-year career as an artist and teacher, Neuman has worked in a variety of styles, including abstract expressionism and geometric abstraction. Employing a symbolism of forms to convey meaning, the artist works in distinct series that always have a specific starting point but remain ongoing as he repeatedly returns to them over the years and decades. Neuman draws inspiration from foreign countries, subjects of contemplation, and personal experience.

The artist was inspired to create the Lame Deer series in 1978 after driving through the Northern Cheyenne reservation of the same name in southeast Montana. The artist aims to pay tribute to Native American history and celebrate the western landscape. Subtitles for individual works refer to significant chiefs, tribes, or locations. The predominant feature of this series is a multitude of linear approximations of teepees. “There is no skin over them, just the sticks. Like somebody lived there once but they don’t anymore,” says Neuman. In Lame Deer (Shoshone), these symbols for abandoned homes and their shadows contain planes of color, as if they have interiorized a landscape that is no longer available. The coolness and airiness of the particular colors recall the palette of Bay Area art that Neuman was exposed to while studying in California.

While each of Neuman’s series employs different symbolic shapes and gestures, they all reflect the unifying theme of travel, of going from one place to another. Here, the original occupants have been forced to move on. In the whimsy series of prints Ship to Paradise, an existential quest turns into an errant mission. Other groups of works originate in Neuman’s reflections on space travel or the trail markers in Acadia National Park. At the root of Neuman’s art is man’s quest for a better place to be, literally and metaphorically.