Dreamscape
A MONA Moment |
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I prefer to call a landscape painting by Lincoln artist Susan Puelz a landscape portrait. Her landscapes depict an inner life. Streamers of color fly across our field of vision with the intense, insistent movemen of Van Gogh's landscapes, and with their emotional range.
Puelz work is an emotional experience--a wild ride of color and line in vibrating movement, brushstrokes of watercolor and pastels bursting into color brushfires. There is an unnerving, psychological tone to this landscape. It is in the grip of a fever, a powerful force to which we cede control, and the loss of control is unsettling, even disturbing. She throws the switch and electrocutes the countryside with color. Trees bend, their sides burned with otherworldly pinks and oranges, their trunks and branches blackened like hearts of darkness. A snake of aquamarine neon winds its way from a fence post in the foreground into a dark pool in the distance.
We are so used to pastels being amiable and easy on the eye--here they are powerful and arch, pulsing in fields of emotion. Puelz is an expressionist. Emotion drives her imagery. She puts the traditional palette of expressionism on its head--the black thrusts of German expressionism exhanged for pastels, their comfortable amiability transformed into hues of risk, enchantment, wonder. The writhing line of El Greco finds its way into the rubbery, unstable contours of this land.
The title of this watercolor pastel is suggestive: Solitary Equinox 1. An equinox is the time of year when day and night are of equal length--where the equlibrium of the seasons is in balance and transition from one to another. An uneasy balance, one which the ancients worshipped and feared. Here Puelz's landscape literally moults from one season of color to another, in a solitary dreamscape--transition, escape, change, mutability, mystery. A friendly nightmare, just real enough to get our bearings, and strangely beautiful enough to take the risks and linger.
