Reviews: Rhode Island

Picture Paradise: Paintings by Sue McNally
Newport Art Museum • Newport, RI • www.newportartmuseum.org • Through August 12, 2009

Named by nature-chasing Victorians in the 1800s, Paradise Valley encompasses a lush stretch of bluffs, woodlands, and beaches on the outskirts of Newport. Development has crept in but pockets of unspoiled beauty remain, remnants of a New England wilderness that attracted artists in the late nineteenth century, when it was a primary source of contemplation and study for the American tonalists.

Inspired by those painters, who obsessively recorded the exotic sea-swept, wind-chiseled landscapes and elemental interplay of shadow and light, Sue McNally presents six vividly evocative scenes on large canvases (some of which are mural-sized). Whether in composition, color, value or subject, all of them loosely relate to specific paintings made in the past. While the works retain the spirit of reverence and awe imbued in those traditional landscapes, McNally skews expectations by exaggerating color or embellishing natural features to convey a unique and contemporary vision.

In creating her series of oils, McNally refers back to four works by John La Farge, two by Martin Johnson Heade, and one each by David Maitland Armstrong, Frederick Rondel, and George Quincy Thorndike. (Small printed versions of their paintings accompany McNally’s images for context.) In each, she subverts the representational style of the previous painters by adding elements of abstraction. Unlike the dark, somber mystery and melancholy favored by the tonalists, McNally’s landscapes are vibrant, boldly colorful, and alive. Patterns of nature—whether cloudy skies, tangled woods, falling snow, or green grasslands—embody a forceful presence and personality unto themselves, accentuating both their independence and interconnectedness as living entities.

From the green tint in the sky of Spring to the crayon box of colors contained within the maze-like woodlands of Valley Floor, McNally evokes something slightly off-kilter and magical about Paradise Valley, conjuring a hidden Land of Oz.

Equally intriguing is the way McNally draws from earlier paintings, giving the old ghosts a second life in new skins. Like Paradise Valley itself, where the Norman Bird Sanctuary and Sachuest Point survive incongruously as wild worlds amid suburban sprawl, McNally’s paintings emphasize the otherworldly quality of an earthly paradise that still exists in some place between landscape and imagination.

—Doug Norris