Face it, real country folk are as likely to toss a beer can into a ravine as they are to contemplate its natural beauty. And think that pine trees are pretty but could be improved with some initials carved into the bark.
This anti-romantic view of nature is the stuff of Canadian artist Kim Dorland’s new paintings at Freight + Volume on West 24th Street in New York’s Chelsea art district. Dubbed "Super! Natural!," the show presents landscapes done with an almost radioactive palette. Indeed, the riot of colors not only makes the eyes swim, but the sheer weight of oil paint applied to the canvases produces a heady, slightly woozy experience.
In the eight-foot-tall Sasquatch (2009), Dorland conjures a colossal Big Foot, drooling with pink, brown, and orange paint like he’s the walking golem of Clyfford Still. Dorlund has pasted patches of fur on his creature for good measure, and given him a dead hare to grip in his right paw, as if to show Joseph Beuys just how a 21st century painter might explain a picture to a Jack Rabbit.
In the towering canvas RIP Tom Thomson (2009), as well as his smaller wooded scenes, Dornan scars the tree trunks with graffiti ranging from the enigmatic -- "The Boy is Lost" -- to the decidedly more uncouth. This scribbling is a desecration of nature and its sublime beauty, of course. Yet Dorland’s landscape has its own ugly charm. Alongside copses of conifers executed in several inches of oil, Dorland traces papery thin birch trees with acrylics and spray paint; or squeezes a few blobs of paint straight from the tube to suggest a clump of lupins or lilacs.
Dorland’s predilection for paint at its grossest has its precursors, notably School of London painters Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff. Dorland bears this lineage lightly; he converts their ponderous gravity into breezy play.
Another artist from the British Commonwealth who comes to mind is Peter Doig, who plumbs memories of his rural Canadian childhood for his much-valued painterly exercises in mystical nostalgia. With Dorland, we get realer pleasures of a tangible natural world, in all its spectacular indelicacy.
Kim Dorland, "Super! Natural!," May 21-June 25, 2009, at Freight + Volume, 542 west 24th Street, New York, N.Y. 10011.
AARON ROSEN is a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University. His first book, Imagining Jewish Art: Encounters with the Masters in Chagall, Guston, and Kitaj, is forthcoming from Legenda Press in Oxford.
