Art

Theodore Dreiser’s Writing Garden (Iroki). 20112018. Acrylic on canvas, 24 x 40 inches.

“That Energy that Spins the World”: The Art of Rebecca Allan

The title for this article comes from a statement artist Rebecca Allan made in a recent interview: that her goal in art was to “capture that energy that spins the world.” As I’ll demonstrate by first considering her most recent work, then going back a bit in time, I believe her paintings succeed in doing just that.

 

Allan and I started our conversation by discussing Looking South from the Dry Garden, a painting that will be in an exhibition at Wave Hill Public Garden & Cultural Center, a place she considers her “second home,” her “spiritual home.”  The show opens January 18, 2023, and is called “Cultivating Eden.”

 

Looking South from the Dry Garden (March, Wave Hill), 2022, acrylic on canvas, 30 x 40 inches.

 

In this work, Allan combines the underlying geometric structural foundation of a historic garden she has been studying for about 20 years with a fluid, abstract brushstroke. With this counterpoint of structure and color, she has created painterly music. She has said she likes that tension between representation and abstraction, or between structure and gesture.

When I told Allan that I saw a similarity between Looking South and an early Paul Klee painting of a mosque in Tunisia, the artist was delighted. Indeed, I see here a strong affinity between Klee and Allan rather than any direct influence. Both love combining representational and abstract elements to create work integrated by movement. Both achieve a musical quality in their paintings.

 

Paul Klee. Hammamet with its Mosque, 1914, watercolor and pencil on paper, 8-1/8,  x 7-5/8 inches.
Metropolitan Museum of Art.

 

Allan has always had as one of her goals to evoke motion in her art; to that end, she also mentioned the art of Sonia Delaunay, the Vorticists, and, somewhat surprisingly to me, Linda Benglis’s knots.

She emphasized that she likes to include a time element in her work. “On a given day, you journey; you start out in one place,” she said, and “end up in another.” This is evident in the next painting we discussed, Conflated Landscape, also completed in 2022.

 

Conflated Landscape I (Wave Hill Alpine House and 225th Street Bridge, Bronx), 2022, acrylic on canvas, 16 x 20 inches.

 

In this painting, the artist combines her early start of the day at the greenhouse in Wave Hill, ending with dusk at the 225th St. Bridge. She says she takes lots of photos and later, in the studio, develops the composition on the canvas. She “finds” the forms as she is working through the painting. 

The bare tree in another recent landscape, Skeletal Tree, Ghost Ranch, evoked for me the one in Giovanni Bellini’s Agony in the Garden

 

Skeletal Tree, Ghost Ranch (Kitchen Mesa), 2022, acrylic on canvas, 16 x 20 inches.

 

 

Detail: Giovanni Bellini. Agony in the Garden, C. 1465-70, wood panel, 32 X 50 inches
National Gallery, London.

 

Although there is no overt religious symbolism in Allan’s painting, the spiritual kinship is unmistakable. Perhaps both are about the “journey” Allan mentioned.  Both paintings depict winding roads, turning and twisting, and leading to some sort of enlightenment. Allan told me that Bellini’s St. Francis at the Frick Collection is her “favorite painting in the world.” So maybe I am not too far away in my thinking here.

Last year Allan painted a tondo, a painting on a round canvas with round stretchers.

 

Harlem River with 225th Street Bridge in Emerald, 2021, acrylic on canvas, 58 inches diameter.

 

She had made several of these earlier, and when asked why, she said she was inspired by the oculus in the Pantheon in Rome. She also mentioned the Italian Renaissance use of the tondo form. I love the fact that she has combined ancient history with her present – her residence near the Hudson River. This also constitutes a literal demonstration of her spinning world.

Allan is drawn to quirky and unusual shapes and subject matter.

 

Landscape with Broken Cart, Tarp, and the River (Pocantico), 2019, acrylic on canvas, 17 x 21 inches.
Collection of Andrew Arnaboldi.

 

She told me that she loves debris in its many forms, and the evidence of what was once alive.  Again, this evokes movement, a journey – indeed, a profound one, concerning life and death.

Duality pervades Rebecca Allan’s art. She continually contrasts real/imaginary, life/death, organic/inorganic, structure/freedom.  She has even gone so far as to make diptychs (as did Diane Churchill and Joan Mitchell, whose work she loves). In this diptych, Allan contrasts spring greens with icy winter lavenders, laced with silver.

 

Theodore Dreisers Writing Garden (Iroki), Spring/Winter, 2013-2018, acrylic on canvas, 23 x 36 inches.

 

Perhaps because of my own fascination with it, I broached the idea of synesthesia. She knew about Joan Mitchell and Charles Burchfield and their synesthesia, but didn’t think she was a synesthete herself. She mentioned that she had lived near Buffalo, a few miles from where Burchfield had lived. She loves Burchfield’s art, and pointed out that he had used abstraction as a metaphor to show a kind of pantheism. In fact, she called Burchfield her “primary touchstone.”

I asked her if she perceived this diptych as real or abstract. Although she called the diptych “abstract,” she did see granularity and patterns of light and dark in nature. But abstraction for her, she said, had to do with “extracting the essence of an experience.” “Painting is a way for me of controlling the uncontrollable granularity of matter,” she said.

Allan is a certified designer in sustainable garden design. In fact, she founded a business in 2019 called “Painterly Gardens.” She designs and restores gardens – mostly residential.

However, she has said, “I will always go back to painting because it is so difficult.  But it is so satisfying when it works.”

 

Bios

Greta Berman received a B.A. from Antioch College, an M.A. from the University of Stockholm, and a Ph.D. from Columbia. She has been Professor of Art History at Juilliard since 1978. In addition to writing a monthly column, “Focus on Art,” for the Juilliard Journal, she co-curated and co-edited Synesthesia: Art and the Mind.  She has published numerous articles, as well as lectured on synesthesia and other subjects.  

Rebecca Allan is a New York-based visual artist known for her richly layered and chromatically nuanced abstract paintings. Her work investigates watershed environments of the Northeast, Pacific Northwest, New Mexico, the Gulf Coast, Lebanon, France, and Norway, and is inspired by her deep interest in botany and land conservation. Exhibiting in the United States and abroad for over 25 years, Allan has been represented in 40 solo and more then 25 group exhibitions, nationally and abroad. Her work is represented in the U.S. Art-in-Embassies Program with a recent acquisition for the permanent collection of the new U.S. embassy in Oslo, Norway. She is also represented in the Bronx Artist Documentary Project, the first photographic record of visual artists in the borough. Learn more about Allan and her work by visiting her website at  http://www.rebeccaallan.com/about/bio. And go to ArtsMart for information about the gallery where her art is currently on display.

2 Comments

  1. WOWWWWW!!!!! Love the comparisons and contrasts between the traditional and the contemporary. Sooooo interesting!!! I always learn from Greta Berman’s column.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *