Michael
Chelminski
New work
November 3 to
November 22, 2000
The body of work in Michael Chelminskiís latest solo
exhibition at Blue Mountain Gallery represents a culmination and ìcoming
togetherî of 30 years of landscape painting. There is a new vitality to this
work, a clarityóand a new direction. While the older work relied on painting
from nature and an adherence to figuration the new work has evolved into an
abstract language of organic motifs derived from earlier observations. These
same motifs---the light on and movement of water, the sky and water seen
through trees--- are replicated in a variety of ways that illustrate
Chelminskiís perception of the interconnectedness of all things in nature.
Chelminski
began his recent foray into abstraction with sketches and small watercolors,
gradually, as he describes, gaining the confidence to rely on memory and work
abstractly. A number of the paintings in the show hover between landscape and
abstraction while others fully inhabit their new province. All preserve some
allusion to object. Of the paintings, Transformation [2000, oil on linen,
48x44î], most epitomizes the new direction. It is a big diptych of a 200 year
old oak tree on Chelminskiís property in Connecticut that was destroyed by
lightening; painted in a way that is both evocative and captures the essential
nature of its subject. Swirling branch like patterns spread out from a central
trunk in a palette that moves from cosmic blue to primeval green, the effect, a
transformation ---from destruction to resurrection.