Neil in the nude The PMA puts Welliver’s body of work on display BY IAN PAIGE
	NEIL WELLIVER: WATER AND SKY At the Portland Museum of Art | through Nov 27 | 207.775.6148 | www.portlandmuseum.com

The late Neil Welliver may not have been born in Maine, but, like so many transplants, he fell in love with the state and allowed its environment to shape his artistic work. The Portland Museum of Art has filled its top-floor gallery with a dignified and cogent retrospective to memorialize a universally recognized master whose reputation is closely intertwined with the Maine artistic tradition.

PMA’s exhibit samples Welliver’s body of work with calculated choices displaying various epochs in the artist’s career. Featured early works date from the late ’60s and depict the natural settings around the Welliver family summer home. Abstraction of traditional representation is the name of the game here. Welliver uses water and reflections coupled with large brushstrokes to push a representational image to the surface, like an Abstract Expressionist taking Monet to the mat.

The most successful application of these early techniques is "Nude Woman Swimming." The subject lies in shallow water, coyly looking up at the viewer. The painting recalls the classical tradition but Welliver’s nude shares the stage with the multitudinous ripples her body creates. Despite markedly large strokes, the artist handles the representational image with expertise, letting the curves of the female body become the curves of the water.

"Osprey’s Nest" is an early example of the woodcut technique Welliver visited for the rest of his career. A lonely nest is balanced on bare branches but the other treetops, sky, and clouds are not relegated to the back. Even the negative space of the sky is a character in the play. Its ominous whiteness births archetypal clouds circling the center subject. Welliver takes a simple scene and summons a deeper, more amorphous subject — one that we often hope to dismiss with the single word "nature."

Welliver’s transformation into a true Maine artist is marked by a permanent move to Lincolnville in 1971. Now able to turn his eye to the Maine winters, Welliver’s style moves in tandem with his environment. In "Birches," the stark white and black of a birch forest are handled with tightly controlled lines of bare branches, juxtaposed with sweeping color gradations applied to the sky.

Approaches developed in works like "Nude Woman Swimming" become easier to grasp when the human figure is removed entirely. "Loon" (1988) features a bird resting in the water, deprived of its depth and reduced to an assembly of patterns and textures similar to an Eastern approach towards representation. The loon becomes iconographic, ready to be placed within a Tibetan mandala or a Japanese print. These textile-like patterns are then echoed in rippled reflections of the water that move off the pictorial space to infinity. Suddenly, a natural Maine scene is far from tourist bait and more a reflection of vision and human consciousness.

"Islands Allagash" gives a glimpse into the artist’s process. This later woodblock print is shown alongside its line drawing study, used to make copies for the different colors requiring their own blocks. The finished print, depicting a tree-dotted island set against a colorfully deep night sky, is patient and inspired much like the Japanese printing style to which it owes its technique.

The accompanying line drawing presents an overwhelming argument that there is something contemporary and still relevant about Welliver’s work. The simple black-on-white drawing has a childlike simplicity, like a Shel Silverstein drawing. There is a reductive tendency at work akin to creating a Photoshop masque. The work could easily be from a young artist responding to an age of corporate logos and visual syntax of computer software. Yet, the technique and inspiration reveal decades of experience and insight.

Welliver displays typical Yankee humility in regards to the wholeness of composition in his landscape paintings. "By and large," he says, "I see a mess; it’s always for me unbelievably complicated." He begins his landscape scenes in one corner and works methodically through to the last. This meticulous approach yields highly non-hierarchical results. Nature is subject in a Welliver painting, not a tree or a bird or a person. Evident in all these masterful works is the ritualized wonder any Mainer knows is part and parcel of a walk in the woods.

Ian Paige can be reached at ianpaige@gmail.com