Looking objectively

Nathaniel Larrabee paints Portland

By Jenna Russell

“Portland, Object and Subject” runs through May 5 at the Jameson Gallery. Call (207) 772-5522.

“STILL LIFE WITH BREAD AND RIBBON,” oil, 2001, by Nathaniel Larrabee.

Nathaniel Larrabee moved to Maine to paint, like countless artists. But instead of spending hours in the mountains, or on the rocky coast, he hovers on the edges of Portland, looking in, deconstructing the city’s pile-up of buildings from a distance. The resulting landscapes — plus three still lifes — can be seen at the Jameson Gallery through May 9 in a show of new work: “Portland, Object and Subject.” The Commercial Street gallery has been restored since a fire damaged the building last year, and it’s an airy, well-lit place in which to consider the city on canvas.

Portland is a place of many moods in Larrabee’s oils. Sometimes her colors are dull, pinkish-gray, almost washed-out; other days, she wears fresh, glimmering pastels. A rare concentration of concrete and people in a state celebrated for its vast, pristine wilderness, Portland is an anomaly, and these paintings seem conscious of the contrast. They bathe the bricks and mortar and phone poles in a light we usually ascribe to Monhegan or Katahdin. Nature backs right up to Portland’s front door, and Larrabee is drawn to the border.

In “Casco Bay Terminals, Fall,” the top of the woods is visible behind the row of round, white industrial tanks, simplified here as pure, violet-gray shapes. The dark vertical bridge interrupts the water’s lightness. In “Evening View, North,” Larrabee shows us a landscape we usually forget: the irregular projections of gables and skylights and chimneys and industrial stacks and fans, grown like alien weeds between the ceilings and the stars. Elsewhere, architecture itself becomes Braille-like surface texture, and Portland’s downtown is depicted as so many stacked and scattered blocks.

Larrabee writes of his admiration for Cezanne, and the French painter’s lessons are evident. Like the Impressionists more than a century ago, he depicts objects — and the city itself — as collections of fragments, patches of light and shadow. Strangely, maybe, the leap can also be made from Larrabee to America’s own Edward Hopper, who specialized in sunlit structures 40 and 50 years ago. The two artists share some of the same flat, matte surfaces and sun-modeled geometry, as well as an interest in collisions of man and nature.

As different from Hopper as Hopper was from Cezanne, the American expressionist Philip Guston exerted brief but important influence on Larrabee, helping him “push away fear” when he was a student, he writes in an artist’s statement. It’s possible to see the link in “Casco Bay Terminals, Route 1, Spring.” In between the bridge pilings, purple capsules of water show through, lined up in squirming animation that fleetingly channels the lively, stubby fingers of paint Guston favored.

Hopper pared things down to shapes and shadows; when light and darkness intersected, a lone figure would often appear. Larrabee’s is an emotional reading, but without literal human beings. The painter stays back, blocks removed from specific cafes and pedestrians. Buildings and skylines stand in for his characters.

None has more character than the red house he paints repeatedly, on a quiet-looking street with the city behind it. In “Red House, Fall,” red and orange leaves blur in the foreground, and Portland is a pile of yellow, orange and white cardboard boxes in the distance. Being red, the house suggests a barn, a rural symbol threatened, but the general feeling is mild, gentle and accepting. Man’s detritus is what it is, neither noble nor evil. Emotion builds in another painting of the same subject, “Red House,” where contrast is heightened between the somber, steely drama of blue sky at sundown and the house, gone tropical pink and orange in the twilight. The color is heat, a desert mirage or a fire-breathing beast.

Larrabee also paints some cooler, green pastorals. The small “West End View” is too perfectly framed by trunks and foliage, but “Birch Grove” is a wonderfully odd composition, a tawny, tilting field bordered at one end by supple birches. The trees are like white lightning strokes, electric bolts of spring.

Larrabee also takes on the traditional still life, largely abandoned by modern painters. It’s a static form, an exercise in a vacuum, apart from real, unstill life. Larrabee’s object studies are crisp and light-colored but mysterious, featuring the kind of tough-to-identify items that tend to show up in newspapers’ “What Is It?” columns. There’s a white cone that looks like a dunce cap; something that might be a stick of blue chalk; a pestle, perhaps; and broken tile fragments piled like fruit. The bread in “Still Life with Bread and Ribbon” is as shapeless as a collapsed chef’s hat.

This semi-invented visual language lets the viewer savor the relationships, undistracted by the objects’ individual baggage. We’re not thinking of plums, or roses, and all the places we’ve seen them, but of the mass of marble and porcelain. When Larrabee paints a violin, it nearly disappears into a slim side view. It’s the same reductive assembly as in the landscapes: experience as mosaic. The painter’s eye is reverent toward his surroundings, toward his ability to participate via perception. Seeing, he says with each brushstroke, is truly a privilege.

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