Essays
2011 Show: Giving a Face to Place:
New Paintings of Ethel Gittlin
Ethel Gittlin’s new landscape painting series Seasons 2011 are a bit like visual recapitulative time machines. This means that they have very much to do with the visual pleasures of experiencing place and space as they do with the pleasures of capturing (or trying to encode) the memory of such experiences and the sensations they produced when initially felt: bodily, mentally and psychically. That last element is important as at the core of it Gittlin is intent on depicting the land and what it arouses in us as we emplace ourselves in a natural environment that move us and that we get attached to. The artist’s paintings record her experiencing of what lies at the core of Nature for us, what philosopher Karl Jaspers once referred to as “the soul of a landscape, the spirits of the elements, the genius of every place…” The artist does exactly this in a unique and unexpected fashion. The results are as philosophically resonant as they are visually enticing.
The artist’s paintings are a record of Gittlin’s favorite spots in the Hamptons, a beach community in Long Island as she has experienced them over time. Incorporating two different regimes of sight emphasizes differences in duration. The first pictorial reality is in the form of the photographic trace that records the scene’s local presence in wintry conditions. The artist using a digital camera takes the photograph. It is subsequently printed onto a mounted canvas without digital alterations or color enhancement. The second pictorial reality are the evidentiary remains of the landscape painter’s touch. The layers of marks and brushstroked colors on the canvas surface records the artist’s impressions and sensations of that same landscape scene as it was re-visited by the painter in the summer months. She superimposes her manual activity directly over the photographic rendition of the same area taking pains to leave traces or shards of the under-surface photo-reality to emerge through the top painterly layer in a manner that is confidently and conspicuously understated.
In L Mont Intro (2011), for example, photo-images of bare branches in the form of knife-edged visual interruptions appear to float, levitating unexpectedly through the painted skies of a bright summer day along a verdant shoreline. A subtle yet striking collage effect is seen and felt that has a distinctive surreal quality that is promoted without fanfare. Such amalgamation produces an unsettling sensation of the uncanny as two simultaneous or alternative (un) natural realities co-exist in an uneasy visual alliance. In Gansett Point (2011) Gittlin’s lush painted depiction of sand, grasses, driftwood, waves, and skies extending out onto the horizon. This animistic landscape, the sacred habitation of spirits familiar to her, is undercut by the wintry photographic passages that interrupt the smooth flow of the tactile painterly surfaces like shards or splinters of unanticipated counter-memories.
Ethel Gittlin’s fuses a resolutely romantic/ picturesque sensibility that privileges an experience of a unified yet harmoniously disparate Nature with a counter- sensibility that emphasizes irresolution, the contingent, the fragmented, the unbidden, and the unknown. Her paintings sustain such oppositions while melding them together to create an unprecedented sense of the real all at the service of emphasizing her attachment to places and the memories they emplace.
—Essay by Dominique, Nahas © 2011
Dominique Nahas is an independent critic and curator based in Manhattan. He teaches critical theory and art history at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute of Art and the New York Studio Residency Program. He is a 2011-12 Visiting Critic at Michigan State University and the Ringling School of Art and Design. His most recent book “The Worlds of Hunt Slonem” (Vendome Press) was released in Fall 2011.
Giving a Face to Place: New Paintings of Ethel Gittlin, Essay by Dominique Nahas © 2011
All rights reserved.
2009 Show: Ethel Gittlin: Painted Nature
Although she has painted scenes from the south of France for years, Ethel Gittlin is offering a show of painted photographs of some of the beautiful places in England where she has stayed—particularly in the countryside, near Eton. Gittlin is interested to some extent in modifying her photographs, which give her the basis of her image but which she does not follow exactly. She starts to paint some of the imagery presented in the picture—rivers, trees, foliage, and skies. But she also looks to manipulate the scene, adding images that weren’t there in the original; bushes might be added, or trees placed where formerly there was an open space. Each time, then, her process results in completely new work; she brings something not quite natural to natural scenes. This can occur in the colors she uses; in one striking painting, of a river in twilight with large hedgelike foliage that sits on the very edge of the water, one of the bushes is a yellow-green, with another a bright mauve. The composition beautifully documents the artist’s attraction to color; Gittlin captures the rose pinks and darkening blues of a sky at twilight.
Part of the pleasure Gittlin offers us may be found in her ingenuous delight in nature. At a time when so many are concerned with the fate of the earth, Gittlin resolutely offers a vision of nature at its luscious best. She takes considerable pleasure in communicating her enthusiasm for a countryside that most of us have imagined if not many of us have seen. In England, where the landscape is composed of gentle features, Gittlin has found the means of coloring her subject matter in astonishing light. While her hues may not be true to life, she changes them according to her rights as an artist, and we are the happier for her having done so. The landscape is a venerable tradition in the history of art, but its features cannot simply be copied; they must become new in the hand of the artist. In another work, Gittlin centers a leafless tree in an open field. In the foreground of the picture is a cart track, while in the distance we see trees of lavender, whose color offsets the photographic precision of the bare branches. It is a striking image, in large part because Gittlin invests it with a luminous silence that is due to the sweep of the view. This is something new.
The combination of sharply described forms diffused with color, along with the sometimes unnatural quality of the hues themselves, result in a beauty that is mysterious and even slightly strange. One senses that Gittlin’s art is based upon realities in nature, but that does not stop the artist from becoming bold in her interpretation. As a result, the imagery becomes a bit distant from itself, as if Gittlin were recording a brave new world. This in no way lessens our understanding that she loves what she sees; one senses that she is recording a vision of nature for those who will come to it in the future, when the world’s beauty may be even more threatened by human behavior. At the same time, Gittlin shows that an idiosyncratic reading of the landscape is the artist’s choice, and that it enables us to see natural forms anew. Her art becomes slightly slanted in its view, charming but also challenging us to experience it as if for the first time.
—Jonathan Goodman
Ethel Gittlin: Lifting the Veil
Ethel Gittlin's landscapes spring from an intensely romantic sensibility. What fascinates her and moves her is the landscape of the Mediterranean, and, in particular, the relationship between the land and the sea. It is noticeable that visitors from northern lands who come to the shores of the Mediterranean to paint have a different relationship to what they see than those who were actually born there. One early manifestation of this was the so-called 'Volcano School' of painters who worked in and around Naples during the 18th century. The paintings they produced are regarded by art historians as one of the first manifestations in the visual arts of the Romantic Movement.
In fact, the depiction of landscape was one of the primary vehicles through which a new kind of attitude to the external universe started to express itself. The romantic painters, like the romantic poets who were their contemporaries, felt an empathy with nature that transcended the barriers between man and the world he inhabited in a way that had not happened previously in European art and literature. It was Shelley who said: "Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar." Essentially what this posits is a fusion between the inner and the outer, between the observer and what is observed. We can see this process at work in art as well as in literature — Gittlin's paintings have landscape as their declared subject, but really what they try to capture is not so much a place, as the sense of revelation engendered by an encounter with that place.
One telling sign of this is her treatment of the sea. In nearly all of these compositions the sea appears through a screen of vegetation. It functions as a kind of unatainable 'beyond' — visible, but never quite attainable. Gittlin has a liking for conditions of light that reinforce this feeling — her skies, for example, are the skies of evening or early morning. She also likes the way in which trees and bushes silhouette themselves against sky and sea, and is willing to sacrifice detail to produce this effect. Her landscapes are almost invariably lit with light that comes towards the spectator, rather than from behind him or her.
Essentially this is landscape painting that is moving towards the condition of abstract art, while holding back from taking the final step into pure abstraction. The reason for this is that abstract painting — painting related to Abstract Expressionism — is necessarily something that aims to conjure up a condition of being, but which at the same time tells us that this condition is autonomous.
It is clear that Ethel Gittlin does not agree with this proposition. For her it is the beauty and wonder of the natural world that sustain the dream, which cannot exist without this external support.
Edward Lucie-Smith
Edward-Lucie - Smith is best known as a writer of books on contemporary art.
His titles include Movements in Art Since 1945, Art Today and Art Tomorrow.
He is also an exhibition curator, poet and internationally exhibited photographer.