Sampling Beaty

Two views in local exhibits: One artist looks at history, the other looks out his window.

by Cory Dugan

hen David Bierk uses the term eulogy, as he does in the titles of more than half the paintings in his current exhibition at Lisa Kurts Gallery, it connotes mourning – for past art, for the plight of Earth and mankind, perhaps for loved ones. There is an funereal hush implied in these paintings; they speak in the low whispers of museums and cathedrals.
Many of Bierk’s images are appropriated from old masters – Manet, Eakins, Vermeer, Caravaggio – and, even though secondhand, they command (perhaps unreasonably) some level of unconscious respect. When looking at, for example, Bierk’s sample of Vermeer’s Young Woman with a Water Pitcher – cropped and greatly enlarged – we recognize and register the whole image in our memory. But, by his selective cropping and the addition of steel panels, Bierk has hijacked our memory and our associations, edited them, italicized them for his own emphasis.
These paintings work best when Bierk adds something to them – metal, words, even the clichéd diptych

David Bierk, A Eulogy to Life, to van Dael, oil on canvas.

format; at least we know the appropriations are being used to another end. When left to their own devices, as in several purloined still-lifes, they seem pointless, mere decoration made almost grotesque.
In a series of landscapes, all bearing the adjective Ancient in their titles, Bierk is apparently borrowing only a style (as they are not attributed) – an atmospheric romanticism akin to Whistler or Turner. There is a light-in-the-murky-darkness genericism to these vacuous compositions, made interesting only by the (literally) glittering quality of the paint glazes.
Somber, altar-like, glazed and varnished to an anachronistic sheen, even Bierk’s best work leans toward the pretentious. It plays an intellectual cat-and-mouse game between high art and glossy commodity, a game where the rules seem a bit fluid, where museums and mausoleums and boardrooms fluctuate in the role of end zone. Bierk dabbles at the drama of high art and even high church; the results too often are closer to high camp, without the much-needed relief of its humor.

Pretentious is the last word one would use to describe Peter Bowman’s work. Free of ponderous allusions and illusions, Bowman’s paintings – currently on exhibit at Ledbetter Lusk Gallery – are weighted only by the paint on their surfaces. In times past, that weight sometimes defied the laws of gravity, warping frames and panels, raising questions about the feasibility of underlying layers of oil paint ever actually drying. Former studio-mates used to joke that Bowman would paint anything he saw; the double meaning referred not only to the everyday-ness of his subject matter, but also to the fate of any innocent object within range of his loaded brush.
The title of the exhibit, “Outside the Window,” presumably tells us what Bowman is seeing these days – the untitled paintings are mostly landscapes, their confined scope and narrow depth of field dictated by a view from an interior space. Often, the sill or frame of a window will occupy the shallow foreground, forcing an architecture upon the otherwise molasses-like composition. The imagery is usually simple and straightforward: tree trunks and limbs, solid lines (made more solid by Bowman’s brush) that curve and twist in opposition to the squared edge of the picture plane.
Even though Bowman’s paint is not as thick as in times past (it appears to be scraped down in some instances), that squared edge – the crisp line between painting and real world – is still obscured by a crust of paint. The smaller paintings in the grouping almost completely lose the rigid geometry of their ground, resembling broken fresco fragments in shape and dimension. (Special credit, by the way, should be given to the gallery for the creative spacing and installation of these works – it lends an almost dance-like poise to a body of work that might appear clumsy in less sensitive hands.)
This is painting as we do not see it very often, as painstaking and obsessive labor, color and form derived from study and concentration, trial and error, from paint upon paint, stroke upon stroke.
Peter Bowman does not inflict some itch-inducing, mystical import upon nature in his paintings. Nor does he play the landscape whore, painting pretty pictures that will look equally good over a pin-striped sofa or a perky receptionist. Bowman paints the landscape because it’s there. Because, as Cezanne said of apples, it doesn’t move. Because Peter Bowman – like Cezanne – has to paint. Something. Anything he sees. n

David Bierk
Lisa Kurts Gallery Through December 31st

Peter Bowman: Outside the Window
Ledbetter Lusk Gallery Through December 23rd