Paradoxes of the Landscape and the City:
Recent Paintings and Lithographs by Tim White

Robert C. Morgan

In a letter to his brother Theo, the painter Vincent Van Gogh once described how he liked being either in the heart of the city or walking in nature, but disliked the regions in-between. Today we might refer to this penumbra, so disliked by Van Gogh, as "suburbia" -- the sort of non-place where the inhabitants are completely dependent on automobiles to propel them from one prefabricated shopping mall to another. In living in such an in-between environment, it is possible to avoid the chaos of both nature and the city altogether.

In the recent paintings and prints by Tim White, there is a kind of abstract representation that signifies a state of mind -- what the phenomenologists call intentionality or cognitive response -- that encompasses this apparent dichotomy between the landscape and the city. Whereas the Post-Impressionists saw a distinction between the place of nature and that of urban experience, Tim White has taken this duality and has moved it into another level of abstract painterly interpretation. While his paintings of cityscapes may appear differently than those he designates as landscapes, there is a kind of stylistic overlay between the two thematic references; yet, at the same time, there is a modulation of sensibility as the artist manipulates the complementary colors, the darks and lights, to achieve the resonance that he wants.

Take, for example, the painting Visionary Mountains (Faraway/Landscape Series ) and compare it with another painting Ray of Light (Cityscape Series), both completed in 1996. Both paintings are done in acrylic, using a palette knife and a significant layering of acrylic gels. The stylistic effect of the two paintings is not dissimilar. In Visionary Mountains , the luminescence burst from the center outward toward the edges. A sequence of curves lines and arcs suggests the perception of mountains going upward into deep space, a system of inverse perspective not unrelated to the great Chinese landscape painters of the Ming Dynasty.
In contrast, the depth of illumination in Ray of Light , rather than bursting from the center outward, is enclosed from the outside inward.

While the interpretive sensibility has changed from one painting to the other, the painter's vocabulary of signs is stylistically intact. In each painting the central aperture of light is important, yet the elements of darkness interceding upon the light in either case is different. Clearly, there is a metaphorical aspect to the work, a kind of specificity that lends itself toward a mystical reading, a concept of representation not far removed from the Futurist Gino Severino or the Suprematist painter Malevich. What gives these paintings their sense of an ineluctable and ineffable presence, however, is the manner in which the color is mixed into the surface, hidden within and between the lights and the darks, as in Rain Alley (Landscape Series), also from 1996.

The sensory cognitive aspect of Rain Alley is not simply a matter of feeling the wetness -- the painterly climate -- that White has given to the surface, but in the virtuosity by which the scraping of the paint has been sustained and controlled within the vibrancy of the light, the radiating complementary hues held within the reds and blues. There is something of a heroic, yet intimate vision given to this painting, something that communicates through the tactile involvement with the pigment, that goes beyond the normative evocation of a fluid and gestural composition.

In general, Tim White represents a sense of wholeness that is perceived and, indeed, envisioned through the fragmentary cluster of resounding opposites. In articulating a similar position, the poet and painter William Blake once claimed that the amount of visible color is less important in a painting than the visible relationships between the blacks and the whites.

This statement might function equally for Tim White. As an abstract painter, White's inner-perceptions of reality are immediately transformed into pictorial metaphors. Central Park South and Central Park North , both from 1996, operate as polar opposites in terms of their directionality. One vista faces north, the other south. The equivalent tempermentality changes. The mood shifts. Yet the overlay of the cityscape with the landscape is also present.

Central Park is a complex paradoxical metaphor given that Olmstead's design was made to function as a wilderness space within the urban environment -- a recluse, a sanctuary that exists outside of measurable, diurnal time. White gives us the sense of conflict within this lamination of nature against culture. The distancing effect is also evident -- the high gloss, made from repeated coats of acrylic gel, what the artist sees as a photographic detachment. One might consider the dramaturgical method of Brecht and the Russian Constructivists-- the defamilization of the subject matter through abstract time and space -- as relevant to White's process.

These qualities are also present in White's use of lithography. Many of the complexities of light and dark spaces, the swirling mystical abstract images, are given to prints, such as Valley in Mountains and Pond with Black Flashes, both from 1997. While architecture is important as a structural and perceptual device, ultimately it is nature that serves as the paradoxical source in White's imagery. This is where the mind enters into the intentionality of the form, where the form is possessed by the artist, and where the artist enunciates his visionary impulse as a vital expression. Tim White is an artist capable of taking us on a journey beneath the surface of those invisible forces that constitute the structure of reality.

Robert C. Morgan is an art critic, poet, artist, art historian, curator and lecturer. He is adjunct professor of Art at Pratt Institute, and professor of Art History at Rochester Institute of Technology. A contributing editor to Art Press (Paris), Domus (Milan), Flash Art (New York/Milan), Cover (New York) and Review (New York), he is the author of a variety of books and catalogues, including: Art Into Ideas: Essays on Conceptual Art (Cambridge University Press, 1996); Between Modernism and Conceptual Art: A Critical Inquiry (McFarland & Co., 1997); After the Fall: Essays on the Art of the Nineties and Oskar de Mejo: The Naive Surrealist. His paintings, sculptures, photographs and experimental films have been exhibited in several one-person and group shows throughout the United States and Europe.