Glisson & Lanier: “Of Matter and Light”
- Eye Level
- 1 day ago
- 5 min read
Updated: 6 hours ago
Under relentless sun, a pair of experienced guides lead explorations on land and sea
It is both accurate and misleading to tell you that Brooke Lanier paints pictures of boats. The Philadelphia artist’s vessels are never freighted with the fish-story romanticism of classic portraits of tall ships. Nor does she give us the cosmic collisions between surf, sky, and sailor’s muscle that we find in the canvases of J.M.W. Turner and other seafaring impressionists. Instead her boats float somewhere beyond the undertow of high drama. They’re awfully big, and they’re not entirely decommissioned, but it’s also not clear if they’re moving. Instead, Lanier treats old ships much in the way that an urban explorer treats old factories: as the site of surprise, juxtapositions, and personal and occasionally inscrutable encounters with maritime history. Close observation, her paintings imply, might be all the care and refurbishment they need.
That said, the boats depicted in “Of Matter and Light,” a two-artist show at Novado Gallery (110 Morgan St.) are not freshly minted from the shipyard. Instead, Brooke Lanier shows us evidence of the roughneck interplay between solid and liquid. The hulls of these massive ships are heavy with corrosion, and the metal surfaces on the abandoned decks have oxidized in the salt air. Yet nothing in any of these paintings suggests that time or corrosion has made these ships any less seaworthy. The seas around them are glassy and placid. Through the authority conferred by size, seniority, and visible scars, they’ve come to a gentleman’s agreement with the ocean.
Lanier shares “Of Matter and Light” with another Novado Gallery favorite: Robert Glisson, a landscape painter whose illumination-drenched Upstate reveries feel as soft and yielding as terrycloth. Glisson gives us a perpetual September of high skies, lazy trees on the verge of turning, green expanses toasted around the edges, and hills melting like unattended bowls of ice cream. Even the way in which he applies oil paint to canvas seems languorous. We can feel his pleasure as he summons heaps of clouds with thick strokes of off-white paint. Each canvas is a memory channeled and a seamless thought-bubble. None beg for amendment or further explanation.
Is there any room for human beings in Glisson’s neighborhood? How about on Lanier’s grand and sepulchral ships? “Chatham Morning,” a winsome Glisson canvas, is set in an actual place: a town of a couple thousand souls in Columbia County settled centuries ago and dotted with old farmhouses. Glisson provides us with two buildings and hints at a third, and includes a wavering (and possibly manmade) spire in the gauzy distance. The buildings are homey, but they’re virtually without apertures. Stained purple by the angled sunlight, they feel as eternal as mossy hillocks and as comfortable as hay bales in a sun-warmed field.
In “On a Clear Day,” another outdoor scene, a doorless and red-roofed structure holds the foreground in a space between two great, fluffy trees. The house commands a road that ascends the hills until it reaches a fence in the absolute middle of the frame. The natural world in summertime is as sumptuous as a wedding banquet, but it’s the human interventions that catch the eye first. People have tamed this land, but just like the sailors on Lanier’s boats, they’re respecting the grandeur of the environment by leaving it unmolested by their presence.
This dynamic becomes even clearer in “Provincetown Traffic,” a rare cityscape from this country boy, and the exception that proves the rules through which his vision operates. At least four human figures are visible at a shaded intersection, and there are hints of others, too; is that blurry shape in a kiosk a reclining ticket-taker?
Not only are Glisson’s human figures faceless, they’re footless, too. Their legs do not make contact with the street. Instead, they’re awash in color like bathers in the shallows of the ocean. Gilsson has taken pains to emphasize their comfort — their body language is unhurried, and the fits of their summer clothes are relaxed. They’re not ghostly, because they’re far too corporeal for that. But they’re also treading lightly in a place that pre-exists them and will still be there when they get out of town.
An even more effective painting is “Searching,” a portrait of a single, small human figure surrounded by the lushness of unlimited outdoor space. The subject of the painting stands as firmly as the purple-leaved tree that dominates the upper left corner of the canvas, and she possesses many of the qualities of that tree, too: mutability, gentleness, late-summer longing, a particular gorgeous shimmer in the setting sun. To underscore this relationship between person and plant, Glisson has imparted some of the violet hue of the foliage to the woman’s shadow. Her head, tipped up a millimeter, lets us know she’s scanning the horizon. Maybe she’s looking for a lost dog. Maybe she’s in search of lost time.
Brooke Lanier, too, always seems to be looking for something. Her boats are themselves the residue of grand human ambitions, and even if their decks are now deserted, it’s impossible to dodge the impressions of sailors past. Just as Robert Glisson gives us Chatham, New York, Lanier takes us to real places: the SS United States, intensely depicted in “Of Matter and Light,” is a real ship that operated as an ocean liner in the 1950s and ‘60s. “A View Worth Sharing” brings us to the aft promenade, now weatherbeaten, streaked with rust and marked by water damage and chipping paint. It’s at once reminiscent of Allan Gorman’s precisionist paintings of the undersides of city bridges and Susan Evans Grove’s photographs of hulls so pockmarked and corroded that they resemble aerial views of cities at night.
Both “SSUS Wave Motion” and “SSUS Portholes” are, like Grove’s shots, not immediately recognizable as images of boats. The subject is too huge, and the perspective is too close. Instead, we get a record, written and overwritten, of years of interactions between saltwater and sheet metal. If the sea has left striations on the steel, the boats have answered by casting yellow-ochre reflections on the surface of the ocean. The water, in Lanier’s paintings, is just an extension of the built environment, a looking-glass, and a liminal place where goldfish, that most human-coded of sea creatures, can swim around while sticking close to the brick walls.
And just as Robert Glisson has challenged himself to go to town, Brooke Lanier has dared to get her hands dirty. “Of Matter and Light” includes a foray into ceramics from an artist better known for oil paint on panels. Naturally, she’s fired a few toy boats. These possess none of the precisionist attention to geometry and dimension we find in her paintings — “Cruiser With Rudder and Portholes,” for instance, has windows that go straight through the body of the ship. They’re anther clue (one of many, really) that Lanier’s love for painting ocean liners has less to do with nautical verisimilitude than it does with the emotions we attach to empty spaces, built for us and now abandoned. Can we find tracks through this floating maze of mirror and tarnished metal? What does that slanting sunlight through the rails reveal, and when we get to the end, what, or who, might we see?
(Novado Gallery is open on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays from 11 a.m. until 7 p.m., and on Sundays and Mondays by appointment.)
