Landscape 1910

Editor: This is "Landscape," an oil on panel created around 1910 by Arthur Beecher Carles. The impasto is so thick, it's almost sculptural. I am curious what visual structures create such vibrant experience, though the brushstrokes do seem fairly chaotic at first glance. What strikes you most about it? Curator: It’s precisely that tension between chaos and structure that holds the key. Notice how Carles uses individual strokes of color, building up the surface to create a textured field. Forget for a moment the ostensible subject matter of 'landscape'. Consider instead the interplay of colour and form. What semiotic function, for example, is performed by the patches of blues in the upper register against the earth tones lower down? Editor: I see what you mean, those blues do seem to almost…lift off the panel compared to the rest. Is that the intended affect? It really highlights the heavy texture; do you think the materiality itself, that thick impasto, is part of the work's meaning? Curator: Absolutely. The impasto isn't merely decorative; it is integral to the painting’s ontology. It draws attention to the act of painting itself, to the artist's hand and process. Ask yourself what new significance arises when paint itself transforms from a mere substance for representation to a prominent component in and of itself. How does the texture invite closer investigation? Editor: That’s really insightful. Looking at it again, it does shift from being 'a landscape' to being about paint itself, the colors and their relationships. Like I am more engaged with the art of painting. Curator: Precisely. It moves beyond mere representation towards abstraction, even while gesturing to representational traditions. The colour activates the viewing plane. A negotiation of figure/ground relationships becomes a new pictorial space that requires the viewer to make sense of it according to their own rules of sensemaking. Editor: So, the essence of this painting resides not in what it depicts, but in how it's constructed visually and materially. I am left reflecting on its colors and their material presence in a new way. Curator: Precisely. And how our interpretation can change so vastly from just the way colours interplay.