THE CANVAS-  March 2010 | by Suzette McAvoy

Joellyn Duesberry, Jessica Stammen & Kristin Malin

“You have the sky overhead giving one light; then the reflected light from whatever reflects; then the direct light of the sun; so that, in the blending and suffusing of these several luminations, there is no such thing as a line to be seen anywhere.”  – Winslow Homer

Joellyn Duesberry – Waterfilled Quarry, Maine, 2006, oil on linen, 36” x 48”

Geometry of Place

In the first half of the twentieth century, the Hall Quarry on the west side of Mount Desert Island provided stone for the construction of Acadia National Park’s carriage roads. Today it is a favored subject of internationally recognized landscape artist Joellyn Duesberry. The solitude of the quarry, and the contrast between its serene natural beauty and the rough geometry of cut granite, are especially appealing to the artist, who paints all of her canvases on-site.

“Working outdoors assures me of two things,” she says, “absolute concentration, and a sense of urgency, which causes me to distill the land to irreducible forms.” Her images are notable for their exceptional luminosity and the perceptual tension between three-dimensional space and the two-dimensional picture plane. A complexity of forms and surface patterns and a broad range of colors are also hallmarks of her work. Duesberry admits to having as many as 63 colors on her palette at one time, although Cezanne, she will tell you, had 73. “Painting is like humming a tune…and I want immediate access to the color note that has occurred to me,” she says.

For more than forty years, Duesberry has traveled the world in search of worthy subjects for her art. “Quarries and rock faces everywhere have long attracted me on two continents,” she says. A seminal event in her career was the opportunity in 1986 to study with painter Richard Diebenkorn, who encouraged her to try monotype printmaking. To this day, she continues to make monotypes—a process whose immediacy informs her instinctive approach to painting. “Every mark begets the next,” she says. “If I just trust the process, I’m going to get it passionately right as opposed to mechanically right.”

Joellyn Duesberry’s paintings of Maine quarries are potent, articulate distillations of place, compelling evidence of her continuing search for geometry and poetry in landscape painting.

Joellyn Duesberry divides her time between studios in Colorado and New York, with frequent travels throughout Europe, New England, and the western United States. A retrospective exhibition of three decades of her work was presented at the Denver Art Museum in 2006, and an exhibition of her monotypes, organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, is now in its ninth year of a national tour. She is represented in Maine by Gleason Fine Art in Portland.

Jessica Stammen – Looking Out, 2008, oil on canvas, 36” x 36”

Ways of Seeing

Windows, with their rich metaphorical implications, have long been a popular subject of artists. Picasso said, “I paint a window, just as I look through a window. If this window when open doesn’t look good in my picture, I draw a curtain and close it as I would have done in my room. One must act in painting as in life, directly.”

Jessica Stammen, a young artist from Camden, so closely identifies with this Picasso quote that she includes it in an introduction to her work. Over the past several years, she has been creating a series of window paintings, including Looking Out, that reveal her intense, personal engagement with the complex, often mysterious, act of seeing.

Using the rectilinear grid of the windowpanes as a matrix for her compositions, Stammen presents the viewer with mingled realities. Inside and outside merge in the compressed space of the picture plane, rendering near and far indistinguishable. Similarly, dark shadows and bright highlights play off one another, throwing solidity and transparency into question. The artist seems to be asking: What is here and what is there? How much can we really understand about this experience we call reality?

Drawing inspiration from her daily surroundings, Stammen’s paintings probe the boundaries between visual representation and metaphysical concerns. “Daily I am drawn into the simple act of looking from inside to out, always trying to get both at the same time,” she says. “It’s both inspiring and challenging to set one’s focus somewhere between the physical mechanics of sight and the framework of imagination, desire, or memory.”

On September 11, 2001, Stammen was attending the Cooper Union in New York City. Her experience as a volunteer following the collapse of the towers led her to create an ongoing collaborative art project with forty international writers and artists. While divergent in form from her window paintings, the Twin Towers project is further evidence of this young artist’s keen intelligence and deeply reflective nature.

Jessica Stammen received her BFA from the Cooper Union in 2003 and her MA from the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University in 2008. Her work has been shown in a number of group and solo exhibitions in New York and Maine, and she is a recipient of a Clark Foundation Fellowship and Gallatin Merit Award. She is represented by Courthouse Gallery in Ellsworth and Dowling Walsh in Rockland.

Kristin Malin – Surface: Cove, June, 2008, oil on panel, 16” x 16”

Elongated moments

Over the past several years, artist Kristin Malin has been absorbed with capturing the surface of the water in Robinhood Cove, where she lives, just south of Bath. Working directly from nature, she sets up her easel on-site and paints en plein air in all seasons. Her fascination has led to an engaging series of modestly scaled paintings that function as visual haikus—concise, intuitively rendered responses to carefully observed events.

“I mostly paint from the same two or three spots,” says the artist. “The paintings are 16 by 16 inches, which are large enough to be able to paint with gestural marks, but small enough that I can get a painting done in one session. That was my aim in this series—to select a motif, capture the moment, and complete it in one session, with the same light and time of day.”

The visual motifs and interpretations that Malin derives from her subject are seemingly as inexhaustible as that of nature itself. Captivated by wind and weather, tidal activity, or the unexpected interruption of a passing boat or bobbing bird, the artist renders their effects on the water’s surface with specificity. Describing the painting, Surface: Cove, June—an image with almost hypnotic wave patterns—she says, “I basically opened my eyes wide and looked, while my hand painted.”

Throughout the series, the artist emphasizes the abstract qualities of her compositions by flattening pictorial space and eliminating traditional landscape references, such as the horizon line or foreground and background. Without these visual clues, the scale of the scene is left intriguingly ambiguous. Filling the paintings from edge to edge, the momentary patterns reflected on the water’s surface straddle the line between abstraction and representation.

Claude Monet’s serial depictions of his beloved water-lily pond are an obvious, distinguished artistic forebear to Malin’s paintings. Her closely cropped compositions and expressive, physical brushwork, however, display a more contemporary aesthetic, not to mention the artist’s individuality. “Each stroke,” she says, “is a moment of seeing.”