Michelle Andres: Redacted Landscapes
Artist Michelle Andres has moved forward in the past year by experimenting with fresh subject matter and a new medium: oil
paint. Inspired by a recent move from suburban Carmichael to a home overlooking a protected parkway along the American River, Andres has responded profoundly to her new surroundings. “I’ve been exploring the cadence of life’s natural rhythm, “ Andres comments. “When it is quiet I think we can hear the trees.”
Working with oils—after having previously used acrylic and mixed media to paint abstractly— Andres has become more sensually engaged in her surfaces that now feature pleasing impasto under-painting and broadly applied washes. The varied strokes and textures of her new paintings work against perfectionism, which Andres strives to avoid and move her art towards calm and feeling, both of which she embraces.
Deceptively simple, Andres’ recent landscapes emanate a serenity that she has been seeking. Their firmly organized and straightforward vocabulary of forms—including trees, mountains and planar landscape elements—tell us that Andres is at heart a formalist whose representational work has an abstract scaffolding underneath. Two of Andres’ favorite artists, Nicolas de Staël and Raimonds Staprans, have helped inspire this sense of underlying rigor and harmony.
Andres’ recent canvas “Hiking with Nicholas,” is a prime example of the kinds of formal relationships that the artist is now generating. Featuring a horizon line dotted with trees and a single white dwelling, the composition is divided (and supported) by an arch of simple planar forms. Its range of of colors—grey-greens, blues, tan and pink—form a chromatic bridge that ends with a bold field of deep crimson. Andres’ ability to modulate color harmonies—and to form geometries with them—endow this composition with its distinctive mood. To put it another way, when Andres works representationally her experiences in painting abstractly continue to affect her choices.
Another smaller composition, “A Fine Young Man,” depicts a single leaning tree caressed by the wide brushstrokes of the sky that frames it. Carefully modulated alternations in brushwork—between smoothness and texture—and interplays between the forms of the tree and a range of surrounding hills make the work come alive. Activated by subtleties, like the hint of orange that hovers on its
horizon, “A Fine Young Man” is one of Andres’ “redacted landscapes.” By refining and reducing her subjects, Andres calls attention to their essences and rhythms.
With their carefully modulated relationships, Andres’ landscapes are meant to slow you down and draw you in. By working with a carefully selected and cultivated set of elements Andres has committed herself to maximizing her own sensitivity while distancing herself from the “noise” of art world trends. Over time, if she can sustain her personal vision, she has the potential to create a highly original body of work. As that process unfolds, her calm attentiveness will remain her greatest asset. As Andres puts it: “I will continue to work on a painting until I find it interesting, like the history of the land itself. I look for small ‘events’ in paint to satisfy me.”
© John Seed 2019