Reviews: New Hampshire

Sandy Wadlington: Up North
McGowan Fine Art • Concord, NH • www.mcgowanfineart.com • September 8 through October 16, 2009

Poised at various points on a spectrum between precise naturalistic representation and expressive geometric abstraction, Sandy Wadlington’s northern New England landscapes attain a quiet intimacy that invites the viewer in to contemplate subtle tonal harmonies amid bold compositional motifs.

Wadlington is a descendent of the pioneering American landscape and genre painter Alvan Fisher, a Needham, Massachusetts, native whose early-nineteenth-century landscapes gloried in the natural world years before those of Thomas Cole and the Hudson River school. New Hampshire’s Saint Anselm College has works by both Fisher and Wadlington, Fisher’s great-great-great-great granddaughter, in its permanent collection.

The paintings in Up North, primarily pastels with a number of oils, display a customarily wide tonal range, but Wadlington revels in the layered and emotive mid-tones of half-lights and shadows. The majority of the works depict rural scenes in and around the artist’s home in Bradford, New Hampshire, as well as Vermont and Maine. At the focal point of Warner River in Winter, pale sunlight mirrored on the water contrasts with dark tree trunks and cerulean and lavender snow-shadows, but a dense network of pine branches dominates the top half of the painting in which subtle warm/cool color passages modulate between shadows and light. Stream in Early May evokes the impressionists in its tapestry of filtered light but also gestures toward the abstract expressionism of artists such as Robert Motherwell and Franz Kline in the stark calligraphy of denuded trees and saplings that interpose between the viewer and the opalescence beyond.

Many of Wadlington’s works begin as Caran d’Ache (watercolor crayon) drawings based on photographs taken on location and manipulated in the studio. From there, Wadlington may recreate the image several times, perhaps in a small charcoal drawing or woodblock print, and then again, larger, in oil or pastel. This multi-stage, multi-medium approach enables her to isolate value relationships and underlying geometries as the work evolves in multiple dimensions over time.

Preoccupied with neither strict realism nor atmospheric “mood,” Wadlington’s paintings thus capture and disclose something of the essential visual elements of the New England landscape that, however elusive at first glance, richly reward sustained creative attention.

—Christopher Volpe