The Brooklyn Rail

In his 1891 dialogue-essay hybrid The Decay of Lying, Oscar Wilde prioritizes romanticism above rote verisimilitude, positing that nature is a paltry imitation of art. Wilde argues that great artists embellish (or outright fabricate) their surroundings rather than depicting nature in a way that is factually accurate, using art as a veil to be cast over the natural world rather than as a mirror to directly reflect it. Wilde’s essay dismisses the practice of gazing at sunsets and cloudscapes as overly literal and therefore unsophisticated, blanketly referring to an actual sunset as a “second-rate [J. M. W.] Turner.” While many other artists have already rendered clouds and sunsets a subject so familiar that we take them for granted, the passage of time has thankfully brought forth Jane Wilson’s cerebral post-Abstract Expressionist renderings of cloudscapes, proving that Turner is not the sole arbiter of moody skies.

Wilson (1924–2015), the subject of DC Moore Gallery’s quietly soul-stirring Atmospheres exhibition and a founding member of the mid-century Hansa Gallery, produced a range of landscapes embodying what she referred to in a 2001 interview as “the substance of things without substance.”¹ Clouds—amorphous, sumptuous, larger than life itself—are a fitting representation of “experiences” rather than static images. Wilson’s paintings masterfully guide us through her understanding of cloudscapes as an embodiment of imperceptible sensations and her own interiority. Her art does not become tangled in the question of whether nature imitates art or art imitates nature; rather, it proposes that nature and the individual envelop one another, using the medium of painting as Wilde’s proverbial veil.

Wilson characterized her approach to painting as “muscular recall.”² Unlike “muscle memory,” muscular recall is not merely mimetic—rather, Wilson’s process combines objective representation with atmospheric memories, one of the ways in which she concretizes the intangible. Wilson’s muscular recall saturates the clouds’ density, hue, and aura, materializing the sensations her environments elicit. In Green Sky in Autumn (2004), for instance, Wilson draws upon hues that suggest an impending rainstorm or tornado and allows these verdant tones to envelop the entire canvas. Appropriately, Wilson’s recollections contort the sky’s gorgeously textured sheaths of altocumulus clouds, like fibrous tufts interspersed with threads of mauve and Prussian blue, into a concentrated forest, merging the skies with land and sea, and imbuing a neutral landscape with threatening undertones.

Wilson once described her paintings as an embodiment of “solitude,” which she distinguished from loneliness as a “valuable” mindset to “accept.”³ This outlook on solitude, no doubt influenced by the artist’s childhood on a farm in Iowa, uniquely informed her intentional yet pensive approach to landscape. The Impressionists utilized visible brushstrokes and non-local colors while harnessing the immediacy of plein air painting to afford viewers a glimpse into their instantaneous, rapidly progressing perceptions of the environment—a subversion of centuries of naturalistic, rigidly academic, Christian and imperialist landscape painting. Around the same time, Intimist painters like Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard applied techniques pioneered by the Impressionists to indoor settings and relationships, with the purpose of redirecting the art world’s focus towards the individual rather than the collective. Half a century later, Wilson’s color field contemporaries, including Mark Rothko and Helen Frankenthaler, created understated ruminations with flattened swaths of color, employing Intimist concepts in large-scale canvases.

Wilson labeled herself an Intimist, yet her works, which merge expansive Impressionist and color field modalities with Intimist methodologies, to transmute infinite cosmoses into meditative confines, are a style entirely of their own. Wind at High Tide (1999), for example, is at first glance an extensive stormy coast at nighttime, with no shoreline or swimmers in sight. However, the skyscape’s dense vapors churn with the ocean’s foam, distinct elements blending at the canvas’ center, perfectly balancing imprecision with detail to culminate in a vivid, even overwhelming, experience. The painting’s ambiguous shapes coupled with its darkened color palette allows its subject matter to take on multiple forms: sloping clouds melt into mountains, the ocean’s ripples unfurl as fog. Here, Wilson–transforming what could have been a detached, vast landscape into a scenic Rorschach test–forges an unsettling, deeply personal tangible manifestation of the viewer’s trepidation.

Wilson’s intensely psychological hybridization of objectivity and memory suffuses her landscapes with the contemplative weight all cloudscapes deserve. Her paintings are a celebration of the monumentality, variety and malleability of their subjects. Even if, as Oscar Wilde argues, these aspects are not inherent to the natural world, Wilson’s art examines the awe-inspiring emotions and qualities cloudscapes inspire, within and beyond the boundaries of a gallery.

1. Jane Wilson, interview by Justin Spring, Jane Wilson: Land, Sky and Sea, Heckscher Museum of Art / DC Moore Gallery, 2001.
2. Jane Wilson, personal unpublished interview, courtesy DC Moore Gallery, 1999.
3. Jane Wilson, interview by Justin Spring, Jane Wilson: Land, Sky and Sea, Heckscher Museum of Art / DC Moore Gallery, 2001.