Continuing through April 17, 2016
There have been no shortage of painters and photographers eager to capture California’s natural beauty, but few can convey craggy trees, cerulean lakes, and precipitous mountains with such simple, stark grandeur as Arts and Crafts adherent William Rice did a century ago. The small prints, ranging from depictions of Yosemite to windblown cypress trees to verdant valleys, combine the reverence for nature of landscape painters with the bold touch of early modernists — colors are vibrant and flat, the lines thickly limned in black in allusion to Japanese block prints.
While “Night — Yosemite” (1925) is serene, with a twinkling starry night reminiscent of Whistler’s “Nocturnes," “Blue Gums Berkeley” (1917) features attenuated trees that stretch tall into a blue sky filled purple clouds, all gloriously backlit. Rice’s view of nature is heroic, dignified, and ultimately benevolent. “Guardians of the Timberline” (1924) features two trees, one felled but the other standing triumphantly atop jagged rocks, a snowy mountain range and roiling clouds in the distance. Humans are decidedly absent which, to contemporary viewers well aware of our deleterious impact on nature, evokes a no-doubt unintended melancholy and nostalgia
Published Courtesy of ArtSceneCal ©2016
