Reviews: Vermont

Gregg Wapner: Landscape Paintings
Southern Vermont Arts Center • Manchester, VT • www.svac.org • December 6, 2008–January 4, 2009

Gregg Wapner, West River, Routes 30 & 100, 8 x 10", oil on gesso board, 2007. Courtesy of the artist.

In a dozen small oils and watercolors made over the last two years, Gregg Wapner distills scenes near his rural Vermont home down to core attributes, with cropped views and a painterly sensibility far more engaged with prominent forms than minute details. The result is a compelling series of potent landscapes that subtly, but purposefully, flirt with abstraction.

Priming his gesso boards with a red ochre or umber base, Wapner builds thin layers of pigment into luminous terrain, resulting in the diffused opacity only skilled glazing can accomplish. Referring to the short, stiff brushes that yield his signature aesthetic as his “ugly brushes,” Wapner’s sumptuous, yet minimal, interpretation of his surroundings articulates a raw, authentic majesty both reverent and blunt. This candor comes through in pictorial choices that are as much about elimination as inclusion, wherein his gaze is leveled at a precise bend in a river, a section of a forest’s edge, or a segment of farm field, emphasizing features of particular visual interest.

Last Snow casts the eye downward to the vestiges of winter, a ragged patch of melting snow Wapner spotted while driving past a muddy field last spring. Hills and trees in the background are so darkened as to become secondary, further investing his subject’s inexorable final hours with poetic import. Wapner’s captivation with fleeting aspects of the environment—seasons, light, flora—emerge in the simplest of images. As if tightening the aperture on a luminist study, West River, Routes 30 & 100 isolates a short curve of gleaming, steely water banked by dusk-blackened woods. Behind a scrim of approaching nightfall, the moment is rendered with such bold simplicity and vigorous, primal dexterity, one can only imagine what might be achieved on a grander scale when an eight-by-ten inch painting packs this much punch.

Eloquent in its reductive force, Wapner’s work homes in on fundamental, organic contours and depths of field, achieving sublime tranquility without being romantic. It is this rough-hewn, elemental purity that galvanizes his distinct themes and significant skills into a fresh, invigorating vision.

—Anne Lawrence Guyon

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