Feel the Heat (Part 2): Climate Change Art in the HEAT July Member Show

By Alicia Perkovich, Gallery Assistant Intern & Heat Exhibition Specialist

In the last two Heat blog posts, we’ve introduced common ways to visualize heat— most recently its idyllic depiction in summer landscapes. But for today’s artists, heat may not be associated with leisure, but with dread. This post will show how Touchtone artists Patricia Williams and Gale Wallar visualize the heat of climate change. Additionally, we’ll show how these artists’ different styles exist alongside the broader movement of climate change art.

Patricia Williams Wildfire I

On display this month in the HEAT member show, Patricia Williams’ Wildfire I, Wildfire II, and Wildfire III are a watercolor triad inspired by the California wildfires. Wildfire I and Wildfire II appear as either abstractions zoomed in compositions of a raging fire, with billows of orange and yellow colors moving throughout the image, enveloping any resemblance of a typical natural landscape. In Wildfire III we see brown trees along a hill in the foreground, with an orange mass of fire creeping behind it, having already burnt nature in its path. The watercolor medium allows for the burgeoning shapes to appear just as volatile as wildfire, creating a range of colors that can visualize the chaos of both a raging fire and burning natural landscape. 

Patricia Williams Wildfire II

Speaking of her Wildfire series, Williams says she “was struck by the contrast of the beauty of the images with what I knew to be the terrible destruction and loss of life taking place. Are beauty and destruction always companions?” To Williams, climate disasters such as wildfires may be visually stunning, but in the end that beauty reminds her of tragedy— the tragedy of destruction, as well as the shame that humans should feel for their responsibility for that destruction. 

Patricia Williams Wildfire III

Williams’ small-scale landscapes, focused on the shapes and volatility that show the essence of a wildfire, draw inspiration from the American watercolor artist Donald Holden, whose works such as Yellowstone Fire XIX take on a similar subject matter, although Holden’s technique of starting with dark colors and gradually moving onto lights contrasts the brightness of Williams’ triptych.

Donald Holden Yellowstone Fire XIX

The sublimity of these watercolors— meaning the awe-inspiring beauty of something larger than human life, which can inspire great feelings of spirituality and transcendence, but also terror and fear— harkens back centuries to Romanticism artists, who, witnessing an expansion of human power over the environment, were inspired not by human achievement, but by natural resilience. 

Caspar David Friedrich The Sea of Ice

Romanticism was a European artistic movement that gained popularity in the early 19th century. At this time, the Enlightenment and its values of reason, order, and human power— as travel and imperialism were proliferating— were popular, and Romanticism proposed an alternative framework. Focusing on the movement’s views on nature, Romantic artists stressed the unpredictable and unyielding power of nature, despite the human hubris to conquer it. The Sea of Ice, by leading Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, visualizes this with the sharp, giant sheets of ice that swallow a shipwreck, showing the victory of nature over humans, as well as the hostility of nature. Yet despite all of this, the ice remains beautiful in its clear lines and dramatic shape— creating the sublime beauty that Romanticism treated nature with. 

While Williams’ Wildfires evoke the same power of nature, we might see this power as a swan song of nature’s powers, since recent wildfires have been the result of human activity. While these disasters may, for a moment, be sublime, they are bookmarked by human-generated climate change, which in the end may leave nature powerless.

Gale Wallar Aletsch Glacier, Switzerland

Gale Wallar’s acrylic painting Aletsch Glacier, Switzerland also reflects the negative impact of climate change’s heat, but in cold regions. The Aletsch Glacier is part of the Alps, located in Southern Switzerland. Fourteen miles long, this glacier has been melting at an alarming pace, adding to rising sea levels and threatening the livelihood of mountain communities and their economies. 

The bright, cloudless sky in Aletsch Glacier, Switzerland, along with the brown, iceless peaks and hollow valleys, are the details by which Wallar visualizes the melting glacier. With poignant realism, the painting seems photographic, and Wallar takes on a dual job of painter and photojournalism. 

Edward Burtynsky Anthropocene

This method of artists documenting climate change similar to journalists is common, and best seen in German photographer Andreas Gursky and Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky. Gursky is known for his landscape photographs which capture large-scale settings. For example, his photograph Antarctic (2010) is a collection of satellite images which capture the entire continent. With its high quality, we can see the ice melting off in real time. Burtynsky, through his ongoing series Anthropocene, works at a similar scale and aesthetic, although his subject matter is how human industry harms the environment— in the end depicting “the landscape of human systems imposed in nature to harvest the things that we need." Philosopher Timothy Morton has described climate change as a “hyperobject,” something so big that, while we can see examples of it, we can’t observe or even understand its totality. This second method of documenting climate change, contrasting from the sublime, emotional work of Williams, as an attempt to approach the hyperobject of climate change. 

Andreas Gursky Antarctic (2010)

Lastly, in the genre of climate change art, site-specific exhibits and installations are popular as they literally ground art in vulnerable environments For example, the 2018 exhibition Indicators: Artists on Climate Change, in the Storm King Art Center in Hudson Valley, New York, hosted the climate-change art of 17 contemporary artists who created climate-related sculptures, installations, multimedia works, and earth-works. For example, Mary Mattingly planted tropical fruit trees from Florida in the art park to speak on how global rising temperatures may force a repurposing of environments to maintain current markets and lifestyles— such as harvesting coconuts in Upstate New York— and David Brooks made bronze castings that replicate natural objects in Storm King’s forest, acting as time capsules as climate change will continue to alter the landscape.

Mary Mattingly Along the Lines of Displacement: A Tropical Food Forest, 2018

Through two of our member artists and a brief survey of the climate change art movement, we’ve outlined three distinct ways that artists depict climate change, and how heat relates to all of their work. We hope that this blog post can be informative in how you look at your own changing landscape, and the role of contemporary art in documenting it. To view Patricia Williams’ Wildfire works and Gale Waller’s Aletsch Glacier, Switzerland, along with the other works by our artists, visit the HEAT member show, open  Wednesday-Sunday from 12:00PM-5:00 pm until July 31.

Feel the Heat (Part 1): Summer Scenes from Imperial China, Impressionists, and Touchstone Gallery Artists

By Alicia Perkovich, Gallery Assistant Intern & Heat Exhibition Specialist

In our last blog post, we provided an overview of numerous ways artists have depicted heat in art. Today, we’ll be focusing on perhaps the most common form of this theme—summer. 

18th and 19th century French artists showed the beauty of summer heat in their paintings. Known as Impressionists, because critics of the time felt that their work looked more like impressions than completed works, these artists created landscapes of their changing environments which favored natural light, as well as bold colors and brushstrokes. These artists were radical for their time as they didn’t paint inside a studio, but in nature. They were also radical for using short strokes of unblended color, as well as using vibrant palettes where color, rather than incorporating white and black, made up highlights and shadows. 

Claude Monet Haystacks

For example, in Claude Monet’s Haystacks series, where he painted the same haystacks at different seasons, times of day, and angles— to show how light can transform a singular subject— the vibrant yellows and oranges of End of Summer, Morning help us feel the sunlight’s warmth, while pale lilac tons in the background show the bounty of the season. Monet’s brushstrokes highlight the hay’s texture while providing a foundation for the light as well as shadows. 

Berthe Morisot Summer’s Day

Berthe Morisot’s Summer’s Day, on the other hand, shows how the French middle class can enjoy the leisure of summer. In a calm pond surrounded by trees and grass, two elegant, and assumedly wealthy, women are seated in a row boat, with the left-hand figure looking at ducks in the pond, and the central figure staring forward with an umbrella on her lap. While the subject appears tranquil, Morisot’s technique is quite dynamic, due to her zig-zag brushstrokes which showcase light reflecting from the water, as well as her color palette that takes advantage of new synthetic paints, such as cerulean blue and cadmium yellow.

Throughout the century, these artists would escape to the South of France during the summer— not only for a sea-side vacation but to experience a region for new, inspiring landscapes. While much of Impressionists work had been focused on how modernity has altered natural landscapes or attention to rural respited amidst urbanization, the French Riviera provided a new oasis of fishing towns, coastal landscapes, and saturated colors for artists to depict. Staple names of the Impressionist movement, such as Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, therefore sang the region’s artistic praises. As time went on, artists such as Henri Matisse— who took on a new movement known as Fauvism— made these travels to greater extents, finding remote coastal towns that led to vivacious, expressive paintings.

Left: James Francis Cropsey Summer Landscape; Right: Henri Matisse Seated Woman, Back Turned to the Open Window

Landscape painting was also formative to American artistic tradition. As America forcibly expanded westward under the ideology of Manifest Destiny, landscape paintings that depicted a vast, unspoiled wilderness romanticized the American landscape. This style was most official in the Hudson River Valley School, which consisted of a group of landscape painters centered in New York. Their paintings were grand in scale as well as subject, depicting panoramic natural landmarks with dramatic light, and features that expressed a renewal in American identity and spirit. James Francis Cropsey’s Summer Landscape, for example, shows a shaded riverbank with a couple— miniscule in the landscape’s scale— enjoying the leisure and harmony of undisrupted nature.

Georgia O’Keefe My Front Yard, Sumer 1941

While painter Georgia O'Keeffe is best known for her enlarged paintings of flowers, she also has numerous landscapes of the New Mexican Desert, an area that became her artistic focus and home in the later portion of her career. A constant throughout her work, O’Keeffe injects life into her subject with lush greens and warm peach tones, along with clearly defining the contours and elevation of the mountain.

Summer landscapes, however, aren’t confined to European or American art. By the Tang dynasty (619-908 AD), Chinese art championed the genre of landscape painting through ink on paper scrolls. Almost a century later, under the Ming dynasty, there were two prominent styles of landscape painting: the depiction of gardens and orderly landscapes which symbolized the order of the state, and literati painters such as Dong Qichang who depicted landscapes as a form of self-expression. 

Dong Qichang, Landscape and Calligraphy

Asian landscapes did, however, influence modern European artists. In a phenomenon known as “Japonisme,” artists such as Edgar Degas and Vincent Van Gogh took inspiration from Japanese landscape paintings brought to Europe upon the country’s reopening of trade in 1853; While not a landscape artist, Degas often used extreme horizontal compositions with asymmetrical compositions and noticeable negative space, while the strong lines and contrasting colors of Japanese woodcuts influenced Van Gogh’s depiction of his local landscapes.

Following this brief historical overview, let’s give attention to how artists at Touchstone have continued the tradition of idyllic summer depictions.

Elaine Florimonte The Opposite Side I

Elaine Florimonte The Opposite Side II

Elaine Florimonte’s duo of The Opposite Side I and The Opposite Side II follow this tradition. The acrylic collages depict opposite sides of the same river, using distinct strokes in white to visualize sunlight, and dark blues to evoke the reflection of surrounding trees on the water. This attention to natural light is central to Florimonte’s identity as an artist, per the artist statement on her website.

Rosemary Luckett Daydreaming in the Garden

Also of note from the July member show is Rosemary Luckett’s Daydreaming in the Garden— a collaged portrait of a figure staring off to their left side. The gaze appears peaceful, but perhaps not fully satisfied. With a flower in their hair, sheet music as the backing for the figure’s mouth, a jewelry chain lining the hair, an upcycled bottle cap for a necklace, Luckett’s work reads as whimsical, picturesque, and using elements of nature to provide a harmonious collage which reminds us of the leisures of summer.

Linda Bankerd White Cap

Lastly, Linda Bankerd’s White Cap and Marcia Coppel’s Just Say Cheese are both paintings which, similarly to French impressionists, depict the leisured actions of people in summer locations. Coppel’s painting shows a collection of people at the beach, confidently posed in swimsuits, with beach chairs and umbrellas. Bankerd’s painting focuses on one figure sitting and reading at the beach. While the effortless joy and relaxation is similar to Impressionist works we’ve discussed, our Touchstone artists still have a distinct style through their color choices. For example, Coppel’s use of blues and greens for skin color make her work appear more playful, finding unconventional ways to visualize the joy of summer activities. 

Marcia Coppel Just Say Cheese

In our upcoming blog post, we’ll discuss how climate change has altered the way contemporary artists view summer heat. To view any of our mentioned works visit the HEAT member show, open Wednesday through Sunday from 12:00 pm -5:00 pm until July 31.

Visualizing Heat Throughout History

By Alicia Perkovich, Gallery Assistant Intern & Heat Exhibition Specialist

Sharon Malley, Mindscape I, 2021

Sharon Malley created her piece for the July member show in December. The work, Mindscape I, is a collage of vibrant warm tones— where blooming floral shapes cover a background of lilac tones. Commenting on her work, Malley writes that it “was to be the underpainting for an abstract image in pastel colors, focused on winter weather. However, as I worked on it, I realized it was expressing my desire to ‘get on’ with winter, as I prefer warmer months.” And so, through her hot colors, Malley not only visualizes her desire for summer, but the heat of summer itself. 

In a collection of blog posts throughout this month, we’ll be guiding you through numerous manifestations of heat in art— from both our Touchstone member artists and the art historical cannon. This post will outline various ways artists have visualized heat, and how in historical and contemporary contexts heat can stand as an allegory for concerns of life and death. 

An allegorical representation of heat— meaning that heat is supposed to represent an immaterial idea, often with political, religious, or social significance— was common throughout the Renaissance. In the Northern Renaissance, which was centered in the 15th and 16th century Netherlandish region, depictions of summer bounties represented the benefits of hard work. We can see this best in Peter Breugel the Elder’s The Harvesters. This painting shows peasants laboring in various steps of the wheat harvest, as well as a group of people in the background enjoying the leisure that awaits the peasants after completing the harvest. Both a landscape of Netherlandish summer and an ethnographic depiction of peasant behaviors, Breugel is showing how heat is a time of bounty, but only after a period of hard work. Nature’s cycle of harvest comes to represent the human cycle of labor and leisure and that hard work must be obeyed in order to come to a period of relaxation.

Peter Breugel the Elder, The Harvesters, 1565

Artists of the same time also depicted heat in the fires of hell, as posthumous punishment for a life of sin and folly. Of the same time as Bruegel, painter Hieronymous Bosch often used heat as a religious allegory. Bosch used both common proverbs and biblical texts to criticize sinful actions, and warn of the damnation in Hell that awaits sinners. For example, in The Triptych of Saint Anthony, a fiery inferno becomes the setting to host demons and sinners which tempt the most holy saint into committing acts of sin. In The Haywain Triptych, a group of foolish people who live lives of sin are carried in a giant hay cart— representing the world’s superficial material goods— from the center panel into the right panel, which depicts a fiery Hell. 

Hieronymus Bosch, The Haywain Triptych, 1512-1515

In our show, member artists also have visualized heat in ways that evoke life and death, but from secular aspects. Placed next to each other, Maureen Squire’s Nebula Series XII, The Butterfly Nebula and Steve Wanna’s Myths of Creation - CE191111.1914 show us moments of space’s heat.  Wanna’s work is part of an ongoing series that relates the cosmic life cycle to the human inclination to origin myths. Based on space photography, Wanna splatters paint to capture the energy of a singular moment of creation. In space, a supernova explosion that inspires this work can reach temperatures of 1 billion degrees Celsius, while a nebula’s cloud of dust can peak at 10,000 degrees Celsius. Squire’s red nebula, ejecting itself against the black background, is ignited in its own heat, but we can see how its materials will dissipate into the cold universe (which averages at -455 Farenheit). While on its surface these three works may just depict moments of space activity, they all use heat as an entrypoint to discuss birth and death— whether it be secular myths of creation, the beauty in a star’s death, or looking back on an optimistic time of expansion that has gone. By visualizing heat, these artists also visualize key changes in life.

Steve Wanna, CE191111.1914, 2019

Continuing with our gallery, we can see the visualization of heat clearly in Amy Sabrin’s Reflections on the Shower Glass (or Self-Portrait with I-pad). This watercolor shows Sabrin in an orange shirt, taking a photo of herself from the glass door of a shower, with its handle and faucet visible. Atop the self-portrait are curved white lines on the shower’s glass, evoking heat waves in the condensation and steam resulting from a shower.

Left: Amy Sabin, Reflections on the Shower Glass (of Self-Portrait with iPad); Right: Maureen Squires, Nebula Series XII, The Butterfly Nebula, 2022

If you’re interested in a focus on surfaces, and the effect of heat and light on them, exploring the photorealism movement would be of interest. Photorealism, an American art movement during the late 1960s and early 1970s, characterizes oil paintings that attempt to replicate photographs. A meticulous process, photorealism treated subjects as a surface to replicate, painting things out of focus or blurry if they were photographed as so, but also honoring how light reflects off of surfaces, how heat may cause surfaces to distort. This is something we see clearly in Ralph Goings’ paintings of diners and other relics of the Americana lifestyle.

While heat itself doesn’t have a specific form or shape, we can see it through bright colors, manipulations of light, and explosions of action. Isolating the transitory sensation of heat allows artists to use the implications of that moment to relish in its temporary nature, and comment on ideas that are similarly fleeting. Look out for our upcoming blog posts to learn about other ways that artists depict heat!

Ralph Goings, Ralph’s Diner, 1981-1982