by Charles A. Riley II, PhD
Cattails, Jewelweed and Detritus, I, 2023, Acrylic and oil on linen, 24 x 18 in.
Floating, mingling, interweaving,
Rising, sinking, and receiving
Each from each, while each is giving
On to each, and each relieving
Each, the pails of gold, the living
Current through the air is heaving
—Edward Young, Night Thoughts
When a work of art makes you want to pick up a brush and paint, then the power of the medium asserts itself like a beat that makes your feet start dancing, like a sonnet that makes you think in rhyme. Layered with exuberance and packed with color, these vivid new landscapes by the accomplished expressionist Rachelle Krieger bear a secret second life. Alla prima, the day paintings share a clear affinity with the serial plein air project of Claude Monet keeping pace with the sun and clouds in the sky over Giverny. Yet this should not obscure the individual punch of each canvas, teeming not only with the energy of nature herself but with the multivalent meanings of impressions filtered through a sophisticated aesthetic consciousness. Monet well knew that near-impossible challenge of capturing the earth’s energy on canvas, which is how Krieger and I first collaborated. Her work was a contemporary discovery in an ambitious museum exhibition devoted to the theme of making the invisible energy of nature visible. This is the compelling reason for the artist to return, day in and out from April through November of 2023, with paints, brushes and canvases to a secluded spot at Cedarmere. It was once the storied estate that inspired the poetry of William Cullen Bryant, a pastoral refuge not far from his Manhattan stronghold, the Century Association, where the transcendental inspiration of old-growth trees and the ever-changing light across Hempstead Harbor were at his feet. The metaphysical pulse of nature has been an essential apercu shared by all the great landscape artists, including Charles Burchfield (whose fingerprints are all over this show, as Krieger herself will tell you), as well as such visionaries as Samuel Palmer, William Blake (his binary logic of innocence and experience rhymes elegantly with day and night), even Vincent van Gogh, who intuited the electromagnetic whorls of the night sky, For the father of them all, Leonardo, the very air was alive with wave patterns like those he had drawn in his hydrological inquiries. All this and poetry on top is perhaps an excessive way to load the intimate experience of a determined artist seeking her lovely spot for a connection to nature, and surely we know of curators and critics who prefer to stay in the intellectual shallows, consigning landscapes to mere illustration in their puddle-deep shows. That would be an injustice to the deeper meanings of these works and the mind of their creator. Poking about in the corners of her bustling studio, I saw the books that bolster our perpetually fascinating conversations: Frank Stella’s Working Space, a terrific guide to the “bubble” of these works as it was for the appreciation of Wassily Kandinsky and Jackson Pollock, alongside books by John Berger and a juicy stack of poetry volumes. As she told me about the small landscape paintings: “It’s my form of meditation, trying not to be too precise, not to judge.”
Recto: The Golden Apples of the Sun
She candidly leads me through the two-step of this brilliant exploration of landscape and sensation, which begins under the sun and concludes under the moon. Bursting with fresh greens and golds (I am tempted to consult the tasting notes for single-malt scotch for synonyms), an enfilade of small plein air studies unfolds across the studio wall, summoning the specimens gathered crisp from daily sessions in the Cedarmere woods. “I don’t go back in after I paint them en plein air. I don’t even look at them until months later. It’s all fresh and on the spot – I keep them that way, not layered, but as raw and as poetic as I can,” she says. One of them certainly brings back indelible memories – the “apocalyptic” orange haze that enveloped the tristate area the day the smoke from the Canadian wildfires hit town. For the record, it was June 7, 2023. I watched that bizarre sunset exactly one peninsula to the west as it transformed Manhasset Bay, where I had sailed going back six decades, into something rich and strange. Unlike the hundreds of millions of banal photos uploaded to be deleted on that day, Krieger’s swift esquisse (many terms also apply, such as etude, souvenir, croquis, ebauche) taps that “sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused,” as my favorite nature poet, William Wordsworth, put it. I only think I know the place that Krieger selected for her meditative project, facing south-southwest from the banks of the harbor, and I have wandered through the dappled sunlight of those trails under the gently moving branches of those trees that, despite their proximity to busy local roads, retain their unspoiled character because both Cedarmere and the 145-acre arboretum it backs onto are a land preserve. With the deft touch of a virtuoso, Krieger summons the morning harmony of Cattails, Jewelweed and Detritus I, surmounted with three swift but sure strokes of burnt siena for the signature fuzzy tips (typha is Latin for a cat tail). The showy orange blooms of the jewelweed below (also known as “touch-me-not” because the seed pods explode at the slightest contact) nod ahead to the fireflies of the evening, about whom more in a moment.
There is a long tradition at work here. “I’m not going for exact depiction,” Krieger states. The precision that John Ruskin urged upon his Pre-Raphaelite acolytes, and practiced in his own tight watercolors, was the mimetic urge to render each life with botanical accuracy. By contrast, Krieger’s undergrowth teems with expressive brushiness, more like the glowing poppies and anemones of Emil Nolde or Odilon Redon (a fantastic pastel of blooms and a profile in the collection of the Guggenheim) and, in our time, the baroque narcissi of Inka Essenhigh. A busybody in Krieger’s studio would lust after the high-end materials, all those luscious tubes, the Kremer watercolors with their richly saturated chroma that permeate the rippling rag paper of her sketchbooks and especially the battery of Vasari oil paint. Perhaps more surprising is the row of Liquitex fluorescent spray paints that she uses in brief blasts of orange that jig into our field of vision, the fireflies – a treat to pursue the scattered spray, like flecks of mica on a slab of granite. My favorite color name among these is phthalocyanine green which suffuses the crepuscular haze of the nocturnes. A wave of the spray can across the gesso-primed canvas starts the painting. This will sound a bit crazy given the difference between contemporary American painter on Long Island and the father-figure of early Impressionism, but they remind me of the vaporous ressouvenirs (his term) of Camille Corot, revered as the le poete meme du paysage by Theodore de Banville. If you go to Cedarmere tomorrow to seek Krieger’s secret vantage point, odds are you will not find it, just as Corot’s admirers would follow him along the rue du Lac near the Ville-d’Avray but come away disappointed they could never find the scenes of his paintings. He’d smile, a dreamer in the same vein as Stephane Mallarme, whose poem L’Apres Midi d’un Faune is the perfect reading material for the elusive spirit of these works. Like Krieger, Corot would experiment with any and all oils and techniques to achieve that vaporous effect. Taking off from the sylvan style of Gustave Courbet (whose heroic greens are the root of Krieger’s daytime palette—her greens are cadmium and terre verte, among others), Corot would park his canvases under the oak trees of Fontainebleau and evoke similar atmospherics using layers of paint (a pioneer in the use of viridium, or vert emeraude, he was also a great one for scraping the day’s work down to regain its luminous essence) on the surface of which, like Krieger’s radiant fireflies, he would dab tiny taches of white or the red of a woodsman’s cap. A fan of Corot, I have two related works on paper made in the bosky corners of Fontaineblau where he and the Barbizon artists would draw, paint and carouse. One is an etching by Daubigny, and the other a photograph by Eugene Cuvelier of a stand of elm trees, snaring the flickering sunlight in a web of intersecting branches. Neither uses color to convey the dappled afternoon light that Gerard Manley Hopkins compared to “shining from shook foil.” Set side by side, as with Krieger’s dual modes, they subtly affirm art’s ability to translate sensation, a walk in the woods, into poetry (think of Seamus Heaney’s Dante, or Shelley’s Homer).
Verso: The Silver Apples of the Moon
This Changes Everything, 2023, Acrylic, spraypaint, oilbar, oil on linen, 70 x 60 in.
Now what? As charming as an exhibition of these rapid-fire landscape studies would be, it is their fascinating transformation that will leave an enduring mark on those attuned to both the psychological and the technical (the inner and the outer) dynamics of painting. With generous candor, Krieger shares the genesis of the changeover from day to night: “It all started in my dreams. I would be outside in those spots, but at night. I couldn’t help wondering what was going on in there in the darkness, when I was absent.” Something more is in store, an engrossing trip into the darkness to retrieve what only the owls and bats and other nocturnal denizens experience. The canvases are suddenly bigger, the palette dramatically changes gears from the diurnal warm colors cut with white to the cooler end of the spectrum plunging to black, those blues and purples that supersede the yellows and greens at twilight, the palette of shadow and depths. In the large, eventful work This Changes Everything, which begins as the others do with a blast of acrylic spray (this time on raw, unprimed linen, the only one of the series that is not gesso-primed white) on which Krieger goes to town with calligraphic strokes of oil bars and luscious strokes of oil paint, snaring that planetary orange disk (those moonrises we stop to admire in autumn) in the pewter embrace of the tree trunk. Long strokes confidently inscribed with the oil bars unleash the winding tendrils and silhouettes of leaves, reminiscent of the elegant contour drawings of Matisse or Ellsworth Kelly. My favorite passage is inside one of these leaf forms where Krieger loads the brush with a chorus of whites, pale yellow and a pale periwinkle, a painting within the painting. Darting through this full, oneiric setting, the numinous highlights of a dozen or more fireflies, quick bursts of fluorescent Liquitex spray paint, sign “Claire de Lune” as they ascend to the tonic disk of orange rising between the branches.
The reversal of light and dark of an x-ray or photographic negative gives Night Vision its stunning magnetism, glowing with the phosphorescence not only of the fireflies but the radiant vegetation, adroitly ignited by Krieger’s light touch with the oil bar. She allows a granular bright green line to stutter across the darker blues fading to black at the base, making pure color a source of light. It pairs wonderfully with Night Garden and Fireflies II, where the aqueous blues of the top descend to maroon-tinged blacks, oceanic harmonies. As in real life, those fluorescent fireflies in the paintings seem supernatural. More literary references grow in this soil. Anyone brought up on the Gold Coast wants to find an occasion to cite The Great Gatsby, and the moonrise at the end of the novel, as we are looking at precisely the same peninsula as Krieger is in her moonscape, stirs a fantasy of the “fresh, green breast of the new world” before the trees were cut to make way for Daisy’s mansion. In his long poem Variations on a Summer Day, Wallace Stevens plays binaries: “The moon follows the sun like a French/Translation of a Russian poet.” The quintessential poet of the metamorphoses that surround us, Ovid, had a phrase for this: Numen in est (“There is a spirit present.”). Krieger’s bicameral project, the woods by day and night, took me back to one of my favorite poems by Wordsworth, Nutting. It is vintage Wordsworth not just in its diction but in the scene it sets. The nature worshipper puts on scruffy hiking gear (“cast-off weeds”) and heads up the hillside near Grasmere through ferns, brakes and thickets and over “pathless rocks” to a remote spot to gather hazel nuts in a place nobody else has plundered (“fearless of a rival”). Before he grabs the first bough, he takes a moment to luxuriate in the Edenic banquet of delights in that “one dear nook.” Then he relates to us the joys of that unspoiled privacy on a late summer morning:
Beneath the trees I sat
Among the flowers, and with the flowers I played;
A temper known to those who, after long
And weary expectation, have been blest
With sudden happiness beyond all hope.
Perhaps it was a bower beneath whose leaves
The violets of five seasons re-appear
And fade, unseen by any human eye…
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Charles A. Riley II, PhD is the editor-in-chief of Hamptons Art Collector magazine and an internationally known curator. The former director of the Nassau County Museum of Art, he is the author of more than forty books on art and cultural history. He resides in Cutchogue, Long Island where, the day after interviewing Rachelle Krieger for this essay, he decided (in a Robert Frost moment) not to cut a corner of his meadow where the fireflies congregate.
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