In Maine, An Evolution of American Expressionism

As artists of the early 20th century explored  the legible limits of painting with free gestures, iconic subject matter, exaggerated and emotive forms,  simplified designs, and flattened space they sent a cascade of influence over artists painting in the remainder of the 20th century through today.  In this work I see a blending of art history with a personal response to the historic shoreline  of Maine. Last week I painted  Maine’s coast with other artists. The work reminded me of the earlier expressive Maine landscapes of ” Ash Can” painters like George Bellows and Robert Henri. Their ambition had been to release their feelings when responding to a particular place. Their concerns were not so much with illusion as with expressive forms and exaggerated contrast.  The forms were iconic and, the space was more map-like than traditionally perspectival and atmospheric space.  John Marin followed the “Ash Can” artists and, he pushed the idea of the map and icon further than his predecessors. ( see example one from 1914 and notice his trees and waves are more iconic or pictographic than illusory and, his space is more compressed and flattened like a map). Other expressionist artists like Marsden Hartley and Marguerite Zorach continued to exercise their passion for the simplified iconic imagery and personally expressive gestures with a flair for exaggeration. ( see example number two by M. Zorach and notice that like John Marin, she iconized the elements of the island). In the 1930’s even iconoclasts like Andrew Wyeth were testing expressionist ideas in watercolor( see example number3). by the late 1940s and early 1950s abstract expressionism was the fashion in New York with artists like Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline.  Younger artists like Jasper Johns were still fascinated with the earlier expressionists preoccupation  with flat pictographic imagery treated subjectively and subordinated to the obscuring gestures of hands and paint. Jasper Johns looked for subjects that were inherently flat unlike the Maine coast, subjects like flags, numbers, letters, and maps.  Like the earlier expressionists he gestured emotionally and freely with the paint while describing his flat icon, a map( see example number four). All of these artists were seduced by the behavior and appearance of paint in its relation to pictographic subject matter. Today, artist Kathryn Poch has visited the same Maine landscape of Marin, Zorach, Henri, Bellows, Wyeth and Hartley but, she is now reaching back farther into art history to rescue volumetric space, illusory space and she joins that concern to her use of expressive color and expressive exaggerated forms. ( see examples number 5 and 6).  Here color harmonies are closely analogous and tuck into blue. In my own example, ( example seven) the imagery is also in analogous harmony, the exaggeration however, comes from an exaggerated sense of perspective as seen in the recession of the rocks and, in the color recession from redbrown to blue.  Both Kathryn Poch’s works and mine were painted on location. The atmosphere of a specific dramatic place may have had a role in our expressive responses.