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Leaf and Bark and Limb and Bough - Landscapes of Jerry Cutler
Gallery: "Traveling Through, 1995‑1997"
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Traveling Through is the working title of a series of large works painted in 1995-97 under a UF Research Development Grant and a semester of research earned from a "course banking" program.
Like some of the Classical Chinese paintings that I was studying at the time, the space is constructed in such a way as to invite the viewer to move through the landscape as if walking through nature. This is in contradiction of the Renaissance/ realist device of presenting a single, dominating viewpoint and it furthered the theatrical and artificial nature of my landscape paintings.
The works are, in a sense, made up of multiple smaller images. These are cobbled together and stacked up in a way that suggests spacial depth, but fails to diminish into a rational point of infinity. The landscape can be said to "rear up," offering each form as an accessible experience and pushing the entire scene close to the viewer. The hope for these works is that they lace together the separate pockets of space into a powerful, cumulative, tactile, and kinesthetic experience.
I continued my earlier three-prong approach in these paintings, working on childhood associations, combining southern and northern landscape motifs, and inventing land/body metaphors. The idea of incorporating the body into the floral images became more challenging in the larger paintings because I could not ignore the tops of trees as I had done in the close-up pictures of the Theatre of the Plow series. Normal tree-crown vegetation was not amenable to my ideas about anatomical metaphors. This resulted in images that have bristly patterns rather than large, soft forms and it lead my friend Hiram Williams to claim that I was the only landscape painter to never paint a leaf. |
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