Judith Miller at Cheryl Pelavin

This exhibition might have been titled "The Return of Judith Miller." The artist, who grew up in Ohio and currently lives in New York City, made a name for herself in the 1970s through photographically based Conceptual art (she was a featured artist in the 1975 Whitney Biennial). In the ensuing years, Miller moved from photography to painting, exploring the representational realm. "Nature Conserved: Paintings and Works on Paper," her first solo show at Pelavin, heralds the arrival of a realist with an eye for landscape, often at its most tangled and linear.

The exhibition featured 11 oil paintings on linen and a greater number of studies, many of them ink, pencil and gouache on vellum, dating from 19992003. The chosen sites offer geographic variety: Topanga Canyon in California, fields and creeks in Ohio, London's St. James Park and the Greenbrook Sanctuary in Palisades, N.J.

A number of the Greenbrook pieces render a rich blend of water and foliage. In Early Fall/Greenbrook (38 by 51 inches), the viewer is situated on the bank of a pond looking through autumn leaves. A fine contrast occurs between foreground realism and background abstraction. Monet's water lily studies are obvious precedents here, especially in Greenbrook/Summer Noon, which offers a profusion of greenery reflected in water.

Light is another important element of Miller's landscape. In Roadside/Estancia, New Mexico (60 by 44 inches), a gully holds the chill dark blue of early morning, while sun illuminates delicate grasses and plants. This is as handsome and inviting a ravine as one will find anywhere in American art.

Even the one urban landscape in the show, a reflecting pool near the World Financial Center in downtown Manhattan, fits into Miller's nature scheme. The reflection of the facade of the WFC tower resembles a kind of aquatic plant floating on the blue rippling water. A few scattered leaves and a duck at the topmost edge of the vertical canvas (49 by 33 inches) help the viewer distinguish surface from reflection.

With this show, Miller joins the likes of Margaret Grimes and Susan Hartnett, artists who similarly revel in the linear energy of the natural world, be it the tangle of grapevines, the calligraphy of dry grasses or the wild circuitry of horehound. We cannot, in these works, see the forest for the trees, and that's what's so engaging.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group