Elizabeth Johnson: In YouTube videos A Feeling for Nature and Painting Arcadia (both by John Thornton), you credit various Tonalists as inspirations: George Inness, James McNeill Whistler, Alexander Helwig Wyant, John Francis Murphy, Robert Swain Gifford, Henry Ward Ranger, Charles Warren Eaton, Mitchell Bannister, and the Hudson River School painters Thomas Cole, Asher Durand, and their greatest practitioner, Frederic Church. Would you say that you mix Romanticism and Realism differently than your predecessors? Also, does the issue of climate change differ from 19th-century paintings that depict the scourge of industry and collective loss of innocence? 

Douglas Martenson: The influence of the artists you mentioned, and of Tonalism in general, culminated for me in a show I curated at the PAFA Museum in 2014, The Artist’s Response to Nature: Tonalism, Historical and Contemporary. The show resulted from my search for and being inspired by artists who I felt went beyond depicting the landscape. In my Curator’s Statement, I wrote: “The American tradition of Tonalism valued solitude in the contemplation of nature. Tonalist paintings bring colors together that are finely attuned to the subject matter in such a way as to create a thoroughly harmonious image. From modern Tonalist painters back to their predecessors, all share a common thread which is the belief that an image should be felt as well as seen, invoking a poetic and meditative state that is romantic at its core.”

DM: As a landscape painter, I see the changes firsthand, but my paintings are more a metaphor for our current condition. I’ve always been interested in cycles; for instance, the woodpile paintings represent the cycle of decay, loss, and new growth, and make a metaphor for contemporary artists growing from the artists of the past. In Fire, a direct image of fire engulfing the landscape, the circle of smoke surrounding the center emphasizes cycles, and is full of movement and drama.

EJ: Smoke is the only painting with figures. The nebulous grey wall covering unseen depths expresses how lost we are both physically and politically regarding climate change. In the video Painting Arcadia, you talk about white party tents expressing loneliness or exclusion, mentioning that one thinks "something might happen, something did happen, something is going to happen." In your current work, do you consider smoke a parallel to empty tents or less articulated zones? For example, is there mystery in the blurred grass in Lupins With Grasses?  

DM: In Smoke I did not show any specific event, so it could be one of many. We had a lot of smoke from the Canadian wildfires this summer. I have been interested in groups of people, a cabal that works out of sight from most of us: so /much of what we encounter­­––what we all have to deal with––is the effect of decisions that were already made by some unseen group.

DM: “Grapple with feelings about what we value or ignore, and what are vulnerable or neglected”––well said. To me, a field is always shifting, evolving, changing. It is a complex ecosystem. I try to make sense of it, search for patterns to bring out objects, frame them with space that surrounds them. It becomes a meditative state that is romantic at its core. I am searching for the relationship between humans and their always-changing environment. These fields, weeds, plants build anew each year when spring arrives, flourishing for a season. Will the arts continue to flourish? Will they get the needed support? Can the arts continue to inspire, speak for our times, thrill, and provoke the viewer?

EJ: A farmer considers milkweed, Queen Anne's lace, and goldenrod interlopers. In Maine, lupin is considered an invasive species. Do you paint weeds because that is what you find on your rambles? Are they perhaps symbols of adaptation and resilience? 

DM: Yes, they are found in this field in Maine near our summer rental where I have painted for the past twenty years. I walk out the door and encounter the vast expanse with all the teeming life of these plants but also the twisted apple trees, the views of the ocean, birds, deer, wild turkeys, and a multitude of other creatures.

DM: When I am outside, I am part of nature, feeling the hot sun and the wind, hearing the wind blow the weeds and trees, getting bitten by mosquitoes. I love the quote from George Inness: “You must suggest to me reality––you can never show me reality.” With my larger studio paintings, I use source material such as those on location: paintings, drawings, watercolors, photos, and my imagination. I feel the complexities of the larger oil paintings need to be away from the subject. This distills the image, develops the idea, and creates its own world. The Hudson River painters and the Tonalists all worked on paintings in the studio. Some contemporary artists that are spurred on by painters like Rackstraw Downes and Antonio López García have become rather messianic about painting only outside. I am inspired by these artists too, but I like what happens in the studio and not being so tied to the observational moment.

DM: There is a shelter, and this plant is tucked away in the corner of the field. The deep space behind gives you this close/far scenario.

EJ: I found myself returning to Lupins With Grasses because it seems to create mystery in the same way Smoke does. Who knows what's under the grass? Do you view the potent image of a meadow in Lupins With Grasses as like your burning woodpile paintings?

DM: I love using this strong vertical format. It really focuses the viewer, like with the painting of the lupins and grasses. I wanted to create a dramatic scene with those long flowing grasses contrasted by the vertical lupins. We do wonder what is going on under the grass. This is the pulse of the field and the last point before the beach and ocean. It dramatically changes right at this point; in many ways it mimics the flow and currents of the ocean. The ocean too has a whole world that is out of sight to us, just a glimpse of sea life emerges from time to time, or something will wash up on the shore. We understand so little of what is all around us. It thrills us. We seek it out. It needs to be protected.   

–– Elizabeth Johnson
(elizabethjohnsonart.com)

edited by Matthew Crain
(@sarcastapics)

October 2023