O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!

With these words, from the patriotic song “America the Beautiful”, written as a poem in 1895, a vivid color experience is brought to bear and embedded in an idea about a people in a young country, a new Eden of seemingly endless bounty. As a youngster I loved these powerful lines and as a teacher I have used this image to explain the concept of atmospheric perspective in painting. It is a potent metaphor for a vast and fertile country that unfolded at the feet of these newcomers, representing their hopes and dreams. If one reads deeply into the song, it is also a sad ode to everything that is and was shortsighted about how we treat our lands now as then: how the land and it’s native peoples were disposed, it’s resources raked off and consumed, it’s wildlife decimated. Some however, held this untamed landscape in awe and saw to it’s preservation in the form of our National Park System and it’s explorers and artists did their part and still the pull is strong.

The “landscape” as subject in art has changed and so has our view of it: from bucolic, romantic, exotic to sublime, to vanishing, victimized, in peril and polluted by deeds of man and natural forces. Our greed and needs have heaped trauma onto our ancient home, sometimes altering it irrevocably. From a faithful depiction of the natural world, or as a means of conveying our inner emotional state, the theme of the landscape has been a dutiful receptacle for all things human, continually morphing over time. And as artists, no matter how we advance themes of abstraction, minimalism or conceptualism in our art, no matter how ironic or laced with the demands of political or personal expression our art forms become, as motif, it persists: our exhibiting artists find solace, subject and soul in nature.

With “Purple Mountains, Amber Waves”, Schema Projects presents nine artists and their vision of the landscape today. Our artists: Gene Benson, Gregory Botts, Rowell Bowles, Scott Espeseth, Finn Have, Jane McNichol, Holly Overton, Jeanne Tremel, Josette Urso, Fred Valentine.

Gene Benson lives and works in the Catskills where mountainsides rise abruptly, each tree and rock looming above the next. In his work, Benson reduces observable imagery to simpler forms creating a luminous vocabulary that enables him to explore color worlds and patterns.

Gregory Botts is a painter who travels and paints on location through out the United States. His work is marked by a strong abstract component of flat and thick lines and patches as he reduces the landscape to the minimum of painted moves, sometimes including in the imagery, the presence of a traveler. Bott has shown most recently at Brian Morris Gallery in NY and a solo show at Alan Avery Art Company in Atlanta GA. He has been awarded artist in residencies at Death Valley National Park, Roaring Forks, Aspen, CO and Joshua Tree National Park to name a few. He was elected to the National Academy of Design in 1997. http://www.gregorybotts.com

Rowell Bowles was born in Chengdu, China, where he lived until his family returned to Canada during the missionary exodus of 1926. He began his studies at Victoria College, University of Toronto, and went on to attend Johns Hopkins University. 
For more than fifty years Bowles was a spirited voice at the United Nations, holding various senior positions, including worldwide director of program policy for Unicef. He authored The Diplomacy of Hope, a critical history of the United Nations, and was a recipient of the Order of Canada . 
A true Renaissance man, Bowles augmented a rich professional career with an artistic one. As a painter, he received encouragement from the leader of the mid-century Montreal avant-garde, Paul-Émile Borduas, as well as Group of Seven member Arthur Lismer. His work was been exhibited at dozens of galleries, including Gallery 78 (Fredericton), the Dorothy Cameron Gallery (Toronto), Galerie Agnés Lefort (Montreal), the Pleiades Gallery (New York), and the O.K. Harris (New York, 2006). Major collections with his work include the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Carter Presidential Center and the Art Gallery of Windsor. 
Rowell Bowles divided his time between Manhattan and Grand Manan. He passed away in 2012 at the age of 95.

Scott Espeseth: strange things happen in tiny places in the exquisitely crafted works of Scott Espeseth. “The landscape, as I experience it most of the time in my home in the upper Midwest, would most accurately be described as “landscaping.” It is rarely wild, more often something planned and planted. For my drawings, I am especially interested in those plots where just enough attention has been paid that they may be safely ignored. The front yards of rental units, the no-man’s lands between divided highways, and office “parks” all are exercises in blank neutrality. Through drawing, I immerse myself in the banal details of these spaces, and find in their blankness a certain metaphysical plane, buzzing with ghosts and clairvoyant messages. There may be an intrusion of memory, warnings from a distant future, or a residue of unease that lies just below the surface. Always, the images are laden with a sense of failure, a pathetic disappointment reflected in their carefully placed yews and hostas.” Scott Espeseth lives and works in Madison Wisconsin. His works are included in the collections of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the DePaul University Art Museum. http://scottespeseth.com

Jane McNichol, paints the landscape exclusively , working from still life to cityscapes, however her preferred motif is that of the open landscape. Jane travels outdoors and makes drawings that feature a strong contrast of black and white but her paintings are created by and large in the studio. Her dedication to the“vista”reveals a strong sense of abstraction while clearly rooted in a personal response to the feeling of a place. http://www.janemcnichol.com

Holly Overton is a young artist living in Bushwick who is also a dedicated singer songwriter. Her watercolors often evoke the landscape of her childhood or travels with the suggestion of a hidden narrative. She delights in the use of montage imagery not unlike that found on postcards, or souvenirs, often with a sense of all American kitsch. There is a bit of surrealism that occasionally creeps into her work and her strong palette imparts an otherworldly quality. http://hollyoverton.com

Finn Have is a Danish painter who seeks to be in nature, to experience it and set it down on paper or canvas. He has painted from the landscape for many years with a brushy expressionistic hand, often laying down color over charcoal drawings. His drawings are rich, moody and spontaneous and he imparts the sense of energy of the natural forces he works from. http://www.finn-have.dk

Jeanne Tremel has focused on studio work in abstract painting and sculpture for over 30 years, adding what she calls, “the hardest challenge, “ of watercolor plein-air seascapes of the rocky coast of Maine three summers ago. Similar in approach, her studio work and work outdoors are spontaneous and intuitive, but being immersed in nature, on the shoreline, along with the drama of fast-changing weather conditions add another element. She adds, “By being a part of the scene, I have to stay in the moment. Instead of talking to myself, I feel like I’m conversing with the water, rock and atmosphere. It’s quite exhilarating to capture a corner of all that the senses take in with simple color and marks on paper.” Jeanne received her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1992 and has lived in Brooklyn for 20 years. http://jeannetremel.virb.com

Josette Urso’s Bushwick studio commands a view that looks out over the miles of neighborhoods that stretch towards Manhattan. Her work in abstract collage forms and her drawings from the land and sea scape inform each other to create a dense unruly grid-mix of lines, marks and colors. Urso’s approach involves “moment-to-moment” extrapolation governed by intuitive leaps of scale, mark and color to create a crazy quilt geometry. Whether she is working on the Amalfi Coast, out of her studio window, or in a messy interior space, she is always making images in direct response to her immediate environment. The paintings focus on the overall experience and summation of those locations, and are the heartbeat and the buzz of each particular place. http://www.josetteurso.com

Fred Valentine is an artist and owner of Valentine gallery in nearby Ridgewood, Queens. Valentine’s landscape work is mostly from and about memory. In the late 1970s and early 80s he and his wife lived on a former hippie commune on the Illinois Wisconsin border. The hippies had long since left and it was just the two of them and 350 acres of pond, field and forest. “At times it was so quiet after a rain one could hear the moisture being absorbed into the earth.” Valentine says. His pieces here, part of a series, are loosely based on looking down and across the land with a pinch of hallucination.

“A graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago, Valentine has roots in the 1970s Chicago Imagist scene that included Jim Nutt and Roger Brown those swaggeringly shameless picture painters who famously embraced human flaws and misadventure when the rest of the art world had turned toward a more austere Minimalist sensibility…..A master quoter, Valentine sometimes includes the illusion of a frame as part of the image. He isn't painting a Romantic landscape, he's painting an image of a Romantic landscape.” (Sharon Butler from her blog Two Coats of Paint)

Fred Valentine has a B.F.A. from the Columbus College of Art and Design and an M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been reviewed and featured in the New York Times, Bomb Magazine, Time Out NY, and other publications. He received a grant from the Pollack Krasner Foundation and was awarded a residency at Yaddo. He currently teaches at Pace University in New York City and was recently included in Brooklyn Magazine's list of the 100 most influential people in Brooklyn culture. Fred is the recipient of a 2014 Guggenheim Foundation Award.

For more information and images, please contact: info@schemaprojects.com