"Everyone seems entranced by the canyon's almost unimaginable depth and distances, and their curiosity and awe make an apt coda for the exhibition, The Grand Canyon: From Dream to Icon.This big new show of work by more than 50 artists, running through January, fills the museum's upper galleries.
...The TMA show has acres of work by Moran's descendents, the Western realist painters who are sometimes naughtily called cowboy artists. Many are extremely capable, such as P.A. Nisbet, whose "Storm Break at Yaki Point, Grand Canyon" gets the prestige opening slot in the exhibition, right next to a rather dark 1942 Ansel Adams. Nisbet has painted a variation on the canyon cliché by adding snow to the ground and storm clouds to the sky. His painted light is a marvel, but his work, like those of his confreres, is hard to look at. The canyon has been pictured in this sublime way so often that you can hardly see it."
Margaret Regan / Tucson Weekly Maagazine, August 31, 2006
"In Taos Gorge [shown on the book's cover] New Mexico artist P.A. Nisbet portrays the ragged slash of the Rio Grande River that bisects New Mexico's Taos Valley with transparent, atmospheric light and spiritual force, an image worthy of Frederick Church or Albert Bierstadt. For Nisbet [b. 1948], nature, as embodied in a painting, is elusive, intellectual, and emotional. More importantly, though, it is spiritual."
Donald J. Hagerty / Author of Leading the West, 100 Painters and Sculptors
Southwest Art Magazine, September, 1997
"P.A. Nisbet is a very good painter, something of a throwback to an earlier artistic age, quite unlike our own, an age that considered craftsmanship and integrity givens in the creative process and had the technical means to back it up.
Nisbet's landscapes are quite luminous, carefully built up through multiple layers of paint and interspersed glazes that explore the rich opaque/transparent possibilities of the oil medium. The light that emerges is both a technical achievement and a creative, spiritual one expressing the highest levels of artistry and the symbolic meaning of light as divinity.
Thus the artist, in cloud studies where light breaks through or rises above darkness, or in landscapes where light may softly or strongly glow upon and model the rolling land, is expressing very profound ideas, genuinely redemptive for our materialistic, over-stressed era. His atmospheric paintings resonate with a healing reality that ties us more strongly to the deeper, richer levels of existence and the soul.
P.A. Nisbet is a genuine artist working with and toward a genuine vision and understanding of the world."
Don Gray / Critic, The Valley Arts Review, Phoenix
"Nisbet travels throughout the varied landscapes of the Southwest and Mexico as the basis of his working method. On-location studies and sketches serve as aids for the eventual painting, but his most important record is his memory of the experience in dimensions that might be called both physical and metaphysical. Really, they are one, and the awareness is the point of the paintings.
One might equally say that Nisbet is an earnest and evocative student of the psychology of space, light, and the horizon, taking the word to its root in psyche, the vital mental or spiritual principle of matter. And just as that principle is taken to be both integrated with and independent from the material world, Nisbet's paintings engage us with their physical subjects at the same time they release us to our own quests."
David Bell /Critic, Santa Fe, New Mexico
The Silent World of P.A. Nisbet A Commentary by Paul Bray
Our journey towards an understanding of P.A. Nisbet (the metaphor is apt: Nisbet's work is quite literally an art of travel and exploration) will begin on a desolate, inhospitable beach fronting an inky sea under a chilly, overcast sky of infinite melancholy and raging menace. This is the beach of Casper David Friedrich's The Monk by the Sea, a work which "meant breaking at one blow with all the known categories of painting; producing a mutation in seeing and therefore in thinking.
Friedrich had quite simply just invented romantic painting; but the break was so sudden, the pictorial language so new, that it left the 'Romantics' themselves almost in a daze." If, as Clement Greenberg once asserted, every advance in the history of painting involves the stripping down of an artwork to its painterly essentials, The Monk by the Sea is a proto-modernist watershed; a characteristic reaction of one of its earliest viewers was " But there's nothing to see ! " From the hindsight of art history we can see a great deal: the valorization of light that seems to prefigure Turner's vortex, the solitary figure of the monk who has arrived several years in advance of Nietzsche's Zarathustra, the technique of paint soaked into the canvas to get a dyer's effect which anticipates such moderns as Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. Thematically it reaches beyond both the religiosity of Raphael and the secular humanism of Ingres; what we have here is closer to the existential angst of Kierkegaard, the Promethean defiance of Nietzsche and even something of the "silent power of the possible" of the later Heideggar, a kind of negative theology in which the very barrenness of the dunes and the bleakness of the clouds seem to forecast the return of some hitherto unnamed ( and perhaps unnamable ) all-encompassing deity.
The scale of the figure of the monk in proportion to the sky he confronts thematizes the human breaking into the non-human; one is reminded of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner: " We were the first that ever burst/ Into that silent sea. "The originality of the painting ( of which the painter is most certainly aware )and hence its historical significance, is thus mirrored by the painting's narrative (a narrative reduced, like the composition itself, to its barest essentials).This is a story which will be retold by Nisbet himself in The Spit, a luminous, almost golden beach of calm and repose,yet one whose very serenity is somehow uncanny.Water and land meet, but where they meet the water covers the land and seems to ripple, ebb and flow with a kind of intelligence. The depth taken away from us by modernism and post-modernism has been restored, but this time with a paradoxical perspective, as if we cannot be sure whether the water is flowing towards us or ebbing away from us, or perhaps doing both simultaneously. Many layers of paint have gone into the creation of this water, but each layer is thin and the underpainting is seamless.The influence of Turner can be seen in the use of the prism (the yellow-red-blue matrix ) but where Turner like Friedrich, is turbulent and chaotic, here the centerpiece is light, and that light is of a pure, almost pristine sentience. Everything suggests the hidden presence of a Divine architect, and yet the painting offers no balm, no succor: there is spiritualism but that spiritualism is almost a cold and impersonal one. Where Friedrich's painting is organized around the encounter of man and nature, Nisbet's painting focuses on nature in and for itself; there is no human figure; Friedrich's monk has been displaced and we now see through his eyes. Where Friedrich's painting suggests a supernatural turbulence which human consciousness may, by some sheer effort of will, come eventually to understand, Nisbet's painting offers us an enigmatic and ambiguous silence.
If Friedrich's The Monk by the Sea is, to use critical terminology borrowed from Harold Bloom, Nisbet's apophrades, or return of the dead, John Frederick Kensett's Eaton's Neck, Long Island is his tessera, or completion and antithesis. "Tessera" refers literally to the broken piece of pottery that, in certain Greek mystery cults, had to be fitted to its missing piece; in art historical terms it refers to the gesture whereby the artist takes up the unfinished task of his precursor and attempts to complete it. According to Nisbet, Kensett is the last of a long line that started with Thomas Cole; his work, which didn't come out of the cellars of the Met until the 1980's, was "on the cusp of taking modernism in another direction;" The modernism that did happen (and which Nisbet also sees as having seminal importance for his own work ) is the surrealism of Magritte, De Chirico, Dali, and Tanguey. If we allow for a concept like "the surrealist ground"(which would include the floorboard landscapes of De Chirico, the desert floors of Dali, and the otherworldly planetary terrains of Tanguey) it is easy to see its importance for Nisbet as a compositional device and as a method for attaining a kind of estrangement effect. This is the modernism that did pick up where Kensett left off; Nisbet, on the other hand, sees himself as taking Kensett's proto-modernism in another direction, the one Kensett himself might have taken had he had an indefinite life span or where his followers might have taken it had not Kensett's descent into obscurity and confinement of his work prevented him from spawning such followers. The compositional elements in the two paintings are so similar as to present Nisbet's painting in the light of a fervent and unapologetic homage to Kensett, yet Kensett's subdued almost Oriental minimalism is, in the Nisbet painting, lit up from within; the simplicity of the Kensett painting is replaced with a complex and powerful luminescence. The rage of Friedrich's vision has passed through the quiescence of Kensett's and has emerged as the cosmic spiritualism of Nisbet's The Spit. Between the two beaches lies a vast expanse of sea, and it is at this point that we should call attention to the manner in which Nisbet's work aligns itself with a whole archive of travel and exploration literature, art and photography; he may even be seen as the painterly counterpart of such contemporary metaphysicians of travel as Peter Mattheisson and Bruce Chatwin. The principal influence here is Frederick Edwin Church, especially the paintings he brought back with him from South America after following in the footsteps of his hero, the great German scientist, Alexander Von Humboldt. In Humboldt's travel journals, Church read that landscape painting was the principal mode of glorifying nature in the visual arts, that maximal diversity of life and landscape is the summum bonum of aesthetic joy, and that " the Andes of South America are the premiere spot on earth for landscape painting, for only here does the full luxuriance of the lowland jungle stand in the shadow of such a massive range of snow-clad peaks." The other luminary to follow in Humboldt's footsteps was Charles Darwin.
These facts are pertinent to an understanding of Nisbet's work, not only for the attention they call to exploration and the metaphor of exploration but for the manner in which art and science coexist in his canvases (he has worked as a painter on assignment for NASA and claims to have spent twenty-five years " trying to apprehend the workings of Nature, the laws of reflection and transparency,the drainage patterns of water, the fractal complexities of clouds"). Like Humboldt and Church he believes that a "fine canvas must be an imaginative reconstruction, accurate in its details of geology and vegetation, however not a re-creation of a particular spot."Frequently Nisbet has used his knowledge of these very details and laws to create effects of defamiliarization, enabling the viewer to see nature as marvelous. One might surmise that what allows for the peaceful co-existence of art, science, and religion in Nisbet's work (as opposed to Friedrich's, where one senses the anguish caused by the depoetization of nature by science ) is that Nisbet is a painter in a post-Einsteinium, post-quantum mechanics age, in which science, as practiced and theorized on its highest levels seems daily to corroborate the more abstruse speculations of mystics, theologians and cosmologists.
We are still journeying; we have crossed seas and entered the western deserts and now we have come to a labyrinthine cavern not unlike the one Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym stumbled into during his Antarctic adventure. To the right, at the lower extremity, we notice the appearance of a small opening; we push into it with vigor, cutting a quantity of brambles that impede us, and remove a vast heap of sharp flints somewhat resembling arrowheads in shape. The ground is spongy. Directly in front of us a silent icon seems to pulse in indecipherable mystery. We cannot tell if light has fallen on it, so that like a figure in a Rembrandt painting, it is emerging from a ground of darkness bathed in the colors peculiar to that light, or whether light is streaming from it. It is pyramidal, but we can not tell if it is natural or man-made. We can not tell if it is living or dead. Whether it is man-made or not we are certain it is sending us a message, but we don't know what the message is. The icon in front of us is P A.Nisbet's Alter of the Desert.
We have reached a tentative end to our journey; it now remains to gloss and scan a few more works in the Nisbet canon. It might prove useful to expand on the displacement, in these canvases, of what in symbolist or Romantic painting would have been the human figure on to the perspective of the viewer, who is often thereby enjoined to imagine him/herself in some harrowing or aerodynamically precarious position: in Night Lights and a number of other torrential Turneresque paintings the viewer is tumbled about in a vertiginous hurricane; in Go for the Stars (a NASA commission) the viewer finds him/herself suspended on a kind of self-propelling bridge to the center of the sun; in Procession the viewer gazes up in dumb struck humility and horror at a brooding council of stone sages and elders as in some aboriginal nightmare of Easter Island; in Heading South the viewer's eyes follow a hooked jet stream across a desert sky like bent fingers following an indecipherable hieroglyph across a long buried papyrus. In all of Nisbet's work the viewer awakens in silence.One might say that in this work the viewer is being directed away from what Heidegger calls "calculative thinking"; for "the approaching tide of technological revolution in the atomic age could so captivate, bewitch, dazzle and beguile men that calculative thinking may someday come to be practiced as the only way of thinking."It is against the possibility of such a grim dystopia that the silent world of P.A.Nisbet has been framed. |
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