Volume 15, Issue 21
Published September 26th, 2007

Landscapes Of The Mind
Tornadoes And Towns, Remembered And Invented
By Dan Tranberg

Images from childhood can linger for a lifetime, growing more and more potent as years of experience cast them in ever-changing light. By themselves, these images can be as simple as a glance at a strangely darkening sky or a peek out of a car window at the distant horizon beyond a wide-open field. In a new series of paintings and prints by well-known Cleveland artist and critic Douglas Max Utter, such images are charged with the palpable emotional energy of his own life experiences.

As a child, Utter and his parents took long road trips, often to visit his grandparents in Iowa. But his use of Midwestern landscapes extends beyond the mere act of recalling memories. Each of his works is complexly layered with metaphorical conceptions of the landscape. So, a cloud is never really just a cloud, and a road becomes a path leading back through the depths of any number of psychological terrains.

Utter began painting landscapes as a child and returned to the format in earnest around the time of his mother's death in the fall of 2000. Over the past year he has focused particularly on imagined images based on memories of the landscape surrounding his parents' hometown in southwestern Iowa. In each of these new works, turbulent skies and funnel clouds serve as reminders not only of the reality that tornados commonly rip through this portion of the Midwest, but also of the immensely powerful forces of nature that inevitably and unpredictably rupture our lives.

Adding further to the layers of meaning in Utter's work is his unfettered use of paint as an endlessly malleable material, capable of evoking powerful ideas just by virtue of its means of application. Most notably, Utter often creates puddles of paint that crack as they dry, forming fractured patches or forms within his paintings, which conjure notions of age, fragility and history. A particularly fascinating aspect of Utter's use of cracked paint is that he employs it equally well in suggesting vast spaces or dominant forms in an image. In other words, he does not use it in a formulaic way. In one painting, an area of cracked paint can appear as a snow-covered field. In another, it's a buoyant cloud. In still another, it's the ground upon which the entire painting is constructed.

"Twister Near Clarinda," a 20" x 24" canvas, is an example of the latter. A slender funnel cloud is rendered in black pastel against a predominantly white sky. A horizontal stripe of shellac near the bottom of the painting suggests the golden hues of dry, late-summer crop fields. The entire image is layered over an amorphous expanse of cracked paint, creating the overall impression that the scene represents a distant memory, like an old tattered black-and-white photograph.

By contrast, in "Tornado at Essex," two areas of cracked paint form the dominant images in the painting. In this case, the fine crackled lines that are formed as thick puddles of dry paint read as finely detailed information which visually lunge forward as those areas painted more conventionally (with brushes) fall back into the distance.

Using these and a range of other techniques, Utter creates mysterious landscapes of the mind in which complex psychological states are rather miraculously recorded in paint. His process of reflecting back on his personal journeys through life lends his work a level of profundity that only becomes manifest through the hands of experience.

Utter's new work is beautifully coupled with the work of New York-based artist Beka Goedde in the exhibition Articulating Space at exit (a gallery space).

Though her technical approach is vastly different, Goedde also builds imaginative landscapes that reflect a multi-layered view of the physical world. Interestingly, her educational background is not in visual art, but in behavioral neuroscience and philosophy, which she studied at Columbia University and Barnard College.

While Utter's work draws heavily upon experience and memory, Goedde imagines and constructs imagery based on speculative and philosophical notions of the landscape. In many cases, this translates into works that reference land and sky only insofar as they conceptually represent ways to articulate space.

Goedde's paintings are accompanied by sculptural elements, displayed on decidedly precarious shelf-like structures seemingly made from portions of wooden fruit crates. Upon these rough, warped surfaces sit numerous vaguely architectural forms, casually made of materials such as cloth, paper, cardboard and plaster. Positioned just below her paintings, Goedde's sculptural forms create a dynamic that effectively gives a broader sense of the ways in which she envisions space as it relates to tactility and human interaction.

Her three-dimensional forms also directly parallel images in her paintings, which often resemble primitive structures consisting of only a few adjoining planes. What makes these structures fascinating is the way in which they are grouped together to create extremely complex images, many of which appear as aerial views of imaginary villages.

Goedde's works propose the idea that the landscape truly is an extension of our bodies, and perhaps even our minds. Although they generally possess a particular orientation in terms of which end is up, their imagery is not bound by the laws of gravity or other notions of real space. Instead, Goedde's landscapes seem to grow organically from the act of imaging one's body occupying and moving through space.

This process is especially interesting as it correlates to the act of standing in a gallery, looking at images and objects. It is as if Goedde has created a space in which to explore the very act of being in space.

Just as Utter's exploration of his personal memories has a tendency to trigger memories in the minds of those who view his paintings, Goedde's investigations into the nature of spatial relationships encourage an introspective mindset. In both cases, the artist's process begs an active response, one in which the very idea of a landscape becomes an abstraction, inside of which our lives unfold.

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