Neil's woods

Nature doesn't need you

by Jenna Russell

Paintings and prints by Neil Welliver at the O'Farrell Gallery, 58 Maine St., Brunswick, through July 22. Open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily. 729-8228 for information.

"Delicate" is not a word that comes up much in discussing the art of Neil Welliver. Maine's second most famous resident artist, Welliver lives

in the woods near Lincolnville and makes trees his subject: fallen trees, tree stumps, dams full of heaped-up trees, thick prison-bar forests.

The trees are often depicted with aggression; in the mature phase of his career, Welliver works in a distinctive, easily recognizable style, and some of the pictures seem specifically to resist the viewer's efforts to work up fondness for them. They reject sentiment, reject prettiness, and retain a primal power that approximates the force of nature itself.

If this sounds like art that won't be "fun" to look at, think again. The show of paintings and prints at the O'Farrell Gallery in Brunswick this month is stimulating and entertaining, particularly because there is so much quantity and variety. There are paintings no bigger than a newspaper, and enormous paintings too heavy for one person to carry. There's an unfinished print that allows a behind-the-scenes glimpse of Welliver's process, and there are pieces spanning 30 years, so a visitor can try to trace the artist's development. This proves a rewarding exercise, even when the chronology resists categorization.

The earliest paintings, from the early 1970s, include a beautiful small female nude in a forest setting and a small, impressionistic landscape of a woodsy glen in muted, milky green light. In a 1974 oil, "Winter Barren," the figure has vanished and the strangeness of the landscape is emphasized, its rocky, alien nature under moving cloud-shadows and its indifference to any human presence. This sensibility will dominate in the decades that follow. It's nature as the anti-haven -- not a view or setting, but the foreground thing itself, unpeopled and unneedful. Even the color becomes less hospitable with the years; any early romanticism is wrung out, and by the time of "Autumn Beaver House" (1998), flat puce and orange animate the tilting barge of sticks with an unapologetic lack of subtle charm.

Is there beauty in Welliver's trees? Absolutely. Products of a painstaking series of impressions, the woodcuts are all about line, a mesmerizing fantasy of line where the visual nearly disconnects from the reality it represents. Some of the earlier prints have a cartoon quality, like "Big Flowage" (1979), where the drifting clouds are outlined in black. Welliver returns again and again to the magic of reflections; here, a second set of pond-bound clouds drifts just under the surface lily pads. In "Sky in Cora's Marsh" (1987), the artist employs one of his favorite edits, rendering blue sky visible at ground level in the water's reflection, but not in the tree line of the print's upper half. As a result, the reflection feels more real, livelier and quicker than the original.

The same thing is true in some of the best paintings, too. A small, square oil study for 1998's "Sand Pool" has a dense weave of birches and pines lit by patchy yellow penetrating from above. It captures the flickering, filtered light inside a forest, the way the sun's rays are altered by their slow, searching descent. In a small pool at the center we see breaks of blue reflected from high up in the woods' pinnacle, an opening we imagine as the lens of a pin-hole camera. The reflection has a mirror's sharpness, and it seems a statement on the world and our perception that we see more in the unreal water version -- a trick of light -- than we do in the direct transmission of the image.

The poet Mark Strand has written that "something in Welliver's work takes issue with our desire to escape the responsibilities" of home when we go into the woods. Strand describes the sense of "abnormal energy" and "fiendish descriptive power" in Welliver's prints and paintings. We sense other things as well, which may or may not have been intended by the artist. "Flotsam -- Allagash," a 1995 woodcut, appears shaped by anger, at least to this viewer, with its raw, torn stump a container for hollow blackness. Roots protrude like the legs of a crab; the light is stormy, severe. Another woodcut of a bird's nest above the treeline is equally stark, but the lines have an elegant uplift, a heavenward arch.

Among the most intriguing pieces in the O'Farrell exhibition are "Blueberry Burn, Morey's Hill" (1997) and the smaller oil study for that painting. Conspicuous for their lack of trees, they depict instead blue sky, green hills, and the charred black path of the burn underneath. These are works of complete contrast -- black and white, heaven and hell -- the soft stuff of appearances on top and the raw, stripped reality underneath. Split visions, they employ the same basic construct as the paintings of reflections. Welliver's burned black holes are all-absorbing, sucking vacuums more powerful than the flames that created them. They are braced by skeletons of rock fingers, and the rocks, heaving up through the surface, are the best parts. This is a simple, quiet kind of chaos, and the artist's synthesis of it encompasses a kind of surrender to the forces of disarray. The results are whole and strong. At 72, Welliver seems to be making further advances into the territory of abstraction, a course as natural and fascinating to watch as the burning of blueberry barrens or the building of beaver dams.

Jenna Russell can be reached at russelljenna@hotmail.com.