Jane Wilson at DC Moore - New York

Jane Wilson belongs to a generation of painters who are either devoted primarily to landscape or feature landscape as a central motif in their work, a group that includes Lois Dodd, Jane Freilicher and Neil Welliver, among others. All were influenced by the paintings and writings of Fairfield Porter but also found inspiration in the great 1948 Bonnard retrospective at MOMA to turn away from Abstract Expressionism. A number of them were still art students.

Wilson was not in New York at the time. She studied in Iowa, but fell in with this milieu over time after moving to New York in 1949. As the painter Roger Winter points out in the fine catalogue for Wilson's show this past spring at DC Moore (which also appeared at the McKinney Avenue Contemporary Gallery in Dallas), the big skies of Long Island mirror the big skies of Iowa. Though she has exhibited regularly in New York since the early '50s, it is only in the last 15 years or so that she has devoted herself to landscapes with huge expanses of sky above low horizons. Since then, her roughly biennial exhibitions of paintings have been one of the not-so-guilty pleasures of the art world.

Wilson wears Bonnard on her sleeve as conspicuously as anyone besides Freilicher. She's out to capture the gigantic and ephemeral movements of weather, seasons and daylight. Bonnard's scrubbing of transparent washes of color over other transparencies, as though an oil painting was a large, rough-hewn watercolor, is a technique that serves her intent well. We can almost see the cloud patterns forming out of rising air as we look through her layers of color, and a reading of those layers is a vicariously compacted experience of the painting itself--washes of colored earth that settle and dry on a broad rectangular plane--forming over time in the studio.

The new work doesn't signal any major shift in Wilson's imagery, but the viewer can sense her increasing deftness and range as the years go by. If Bonnard remains a principal influence, it is also apparent that her paintings address a particular Romantic continuum that runs from Turner through Bonnard and on to Rothko. Wilson doesn't seem so much concerned with meteorological verisimilitude as she is with invoking feeling, particularly an intense combination of the joyful and elegiac.

The light effects in Wilson's paintings, especially the larger canvases, are often breathtaking. Consider the ropes of nearly iridescent pink braiding themselves into dark, almost black-green nodules of shadowed clouds near the top foreground of Passing Rain (2002). The light is intensely felt, and believable as an intensification of whatever observation and memory provided of an actual vista. Similarly, Wind at Sunset (2002) weaves yellows among the metallic blue nodes of a crepuscular, mackerel sky. Here again, Bonnard's resonance hangs in the air among the violets and oranges at the horizon line.

A side note: I've always derived quiet satisfaction from looking for Wilson's signature, a sturdy cursive near the top or bottom, worked into the color scheme of each painting in a camouflaging tint. This is the stuff of what Carroll Dunham has called "painting culture," and is probably of little interest to those outside it. But the signature has virtually disappeared as an ingredient in the surface of contemporary painting. The way Wilson incorporates it is just another small indication of how she looks through the task of picture-making to painting's deeper structures.

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