The Brooklyn Rail

Dating from the late 1980s to the late 2000s, the ten paintings and eight small watercolors in Jane Wilson: Atmospheres are at once monumental and meditative, immersive and intimate, in the tradition of artists such as Theodore Rousseau and George Inness, for whom landscape was a means for representing moods and states of mind. Wilson paints dramatic skies looming large above the horizon, populated by clouds that signal inbound winds and impending storms — imagery rendered in a pictorial language that is knowingly informed by abstraction.

“What I’m aiming for are moments of strong sensation,” Jane Wilson explained to critic Justin Spring on the occasion of her 2001 Heckscher Museum exhibition “moments of total physical experience of landscape, when the weather just reaches out and sucks you in.” She sought to make palpable the sensation and experience of weather and not merely its appearance. Under the wispy plum sky of Tempest (1993), for example, atmospheric light floats like a substance, ruddy and fading, suspended above the low-lying horizon. The term “post-abstract” has been used to describe the style of figurative painters such as Alex Katz and Neil Welliver, and can be rightly applied to Wilson, though the forms in her paintings are always unbounded and amorphous, sea and sky, light and land, blending into one another. Subtly inflected diagonals in a warm green field lead the eye to the top of Moon in Transit (1990), where the tree line gives way to pale green cloud cover; the moon casts a faint glow that’s consumed by dark green clouds at the top of the picture.

The thin, dry, scumbled surface of Wilson’s paintings is also quite unlike her landscape contemporaries, and recalls Mark Rothko (to whom Wilson pointed as a crucial influence on her art), and especially the late Milton Avery. It is as if she paints into the surface and not atop it, so that light is suffused throughout the painting, and, rather than beaming from a source, seems to emanate from within. This quality is evident in the virtually abstract Whirlwind (2002), where a bright, morning light pulses through the patchwork surface — a breathing, ethereal surface of fluttering brushstrokes that billow like wind and ripple like wavelets. More subtle is Wilson’s construction of dim, lambent light in Eclipse (1991), which fans from the top of the painting, first in somber, gray tones, then in an arc of burnt umber dulled by pale teal and purple, though this description belies the painting’s nearly imperceptible tonal modulations. In Eclipse, as in many of the paintings included in Atmospheres, the weight and density of the sky feels more substantial than land or sea.

The diaphanous surface and diffuse light of Wilson’s oil paintings translate well to watercolor. Her hand is visually absent in Traveling Rain (2006) where the aqueous quality of the medium allows her to depict the weather through suggestion rather than description. Similarly, in Patchy Morning (2006), an accumulation of whirling marks evokes a gust of wind. If, in these pictures, the physicality of medium helps conjure climate conditions, some of the other watercolors, particularly North Haven, August 1999 (1999), are among the most realistically rendered works in the exhibition.

If I’ve compared aspects of Wilson’s work to her contemporaries and historical antecedents, it is not to suggest that her work is derivative, but to emphasize what is particular and unique about her art, and more importantly, her vast knowledge of painting, internalized and synthesized, that can be felt throughout these works. That said, I’d suggest Whistler’s Nocturnes as one final point of reference for the show’s most enigmatic paintings — the otherworldly Wind at High Tide (1999) and the brooding Green Sky in Autumn (2004). In the former picture, as in Whistler’s Tonalist works, the green sea and sky blend seamlessly together, like waves of energy issuing from the same source. Ominous storm clouds, alight by unseen moonlight, glow with a phosphorescent light in Green Sky in Autumn. Both pictures speak to Wilson’s gifts as a colorist, as she wrests a range of moods and an enveloping ambience of light and shadow from what feels like a single hue extended and expanded into an entire world.

Transience pervades these paintings. Wilson captures fleeting phenomena of light, wind, and weather, and leaves them suspended, between night and day, between largeness and intimacy, stillness and motion. “The painting I do is the only way I have to catch something that is constantly changing,” she explained. “To capture experience.”