When I’m traveling, people often suggest that I look at
the work of an artist I don’t know. Here are two I met this summer.
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The Dinner Hour, 2006, egg tempera, Tom Forrestall, courtesy
Mira Godard Gallery, Toronto
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“[Magic realism] employs various techniques that endow all
things with a deeper meaning and reveal mysteries that always threaten the
secure tranquility of simple and ingenuous things.... it is a question of
representing before our eyes, in an intuitive way, the fact, the interior figure,
of the exterior world,” wrote Roh.
In my opinion, Andrew Wyeth is a magical
realist, because his narratives transcend mere realism. Forrestall is often
called the “Canadian Wyeth” because of his similarity to Wyeth, both in content
and because of his meticulous application of egg tempera.
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Moon, egg tempera, c. 1971, Tom Forrestall, courtesy Atlantic
Fine Art
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Forrestall rejects the notion that paintings should always be rectangular,
and makes them in fanciful shapes. The Dinner Hour, at top, is an homage
to his late wife, Natalie. Forrestall wrote on the back: “Natalie’s little
cross over her kitchen door she hung there many years ago — true to her Acadian
roots, it shall hang there while I’m still around.” He and Natalie married in
1958, and she ran his art business and household. “She managed things extremely
well and it never rattled her with all these six kids,” Forrestall said.
Forrestall came from Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley. He
attended Saturday morning art classes at the Nova Scotia College of Art in
Halifax. He was awarded a scholarship to the Fine Arts department at Mount
Allison University, where he studied with Canadian greats Lawren Harris and Alex Colville. He received
one of the first Canada Council grants for independent study, which allowed him
to travel throughout Europe. He has been a freelance artist since 1960. He was
introduced to me by Nova Scotian artists Michael Fuller
and Krista
Wells.
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Water Filled Quarry, oil on linen, Joellyn Duesberry, courtesy
Joellyn Duesberry
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Last weekend at Rye
Painters on Location, an auction-goer told me that my work reminded her of
the late Joellyn Toler
Duesberry. Duesberry once said of her art, “I am not interested in a
realist painting, I am not interested in an abstract painting. I am interested
in the tension.” That’s a sentiment that rings true to me, although I don’t
really see too much similarity in our work.
Duesberry was raised in rural Virginia, and had a deep connection
to landscape. “All my life I think I've unconsciously tried to re-create the
place where bliss or terror first came to me,” she said. “Both emotions seemed
so strong that I had to locate them outside of myself, in the land.”
She received a BA with Distinction in art history and
painting from Smith College and was awarded a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. She then
earned her master's degree at New York University
Institute of Fine Arts.
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Rainy Morning in Maine II, 2009, monotype, Joellyn
Duesberry, courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art
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She moved to Denver in 1985, saying that the clearer air revealed
more of the sharp bones of the landscape. But she also spent 40 years painting on
the Maine coast. She cited John Marin and Milton
Avery as the greatest influences in her art.
In 1986 she was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts
grant. This enabled her to work with Richard Diebenkorn.
He encouraged her to try monotype printing, and she began actively producing
and exhibiting her monotypes along with her plein-air paintings.
