ArtOpticon.us

The British Romantic landscapist John Constable (1776-1837) once declared, “It will be difficult to name a class of landscape in which the sky is not the keynote, the standard of scale, and the chief organ of sentiment.” 

Samantha Fields, “The Path of Totality,”

2024, acrylic on canvas, 41 x 27”.

All images courtesy of Traywick Gallery, Berkeley.

Samantha Fields’ exhibition of recent paintings, “Portents,” with their multiple layers of airbrushed pigment, focuses on the skies of Fields’ Los Angeles as their “chief organ of sentiment.” In the 21st century this organ is one brought about by natural forces subject to physical laws, not the judgments of celestial overseers. Even without God in his heaven, however, the skies retain their fascination and awe. Fields has returned to the skies — and their associated clouds, fog, celestial bodies, fires, and fireworks — after a transitional period of domestic interiors realized during the pandemic lockdown. 

“Portents” includes eleven medium-sized to small paintings, all derived from “failed photographs,” i.e., flawed snapshots, replete with photographic ‘mistakes,’ like lens flares, but adapted and perfected during the artist’s lengthy painting process. All are beautiful and mysterious, all imply something that is not yet evident, the promise of a withheld or ambiguous revelation, as Jorge Luis Borges put it. In the aftermath of the recent wildfires, a subject that the artist has explored before, it is easy to interpret the paintings secularly as environmental warnings to Angelenos to get our minds right about rebuilding in the naturally fire-prone Southern California ecosystem, especially given our poisoned political culture.

The gallery notes that “Portents” evokes a fractured world that may be slipping away — a reality that is constantly in flux and just out of reach. “Fields,” they assert, “uses the metaphor of celestial phenomena, such as a total solar eclipse, to articulate this elusive feeling.” The transient phenomena of the natural world are thus caught and preserved in paintings that freeze and condense time for our leisurely contemplation. “Portent,” the show’s eponymous painting, depicts a dust storm or tornado as seen from afar, darkly foreboding swirling masses of muted color that evoke recent natural twister disasters in the American south.

Looking at this ominous image I could easily imagine the desperation felt by pre-scientific people who anthropomorphized such brutal force in order to explain it.

Samantha Fields, “Whole Sky,” 2024, acrylic on canvas, 24 x 24”.

“The Path of Totality” presents a wide-angle view of a total eclipse, with the blacked-out sun at the top encircled by an aureole of clouds, and echoed by a tiny sun at the bottom, just above the dark horizon — a scientific anomaly, given poetic license: the heavenly and earthly realms suggest the Latin ut supra ut infra, as above, so below, and the bipartite composition of Raphael’s “Transfiguration.” “Prominence” and “Cathedral” focus on the blackened solar disk in eclipse surrounded by clouds. In reality, the danger of eye damage prohibits us from staring at a solar eclipse without eye protection. Fields’ image allows us to stare fixedly, the black disk metamorphosing into our eyes’ pupils, as in Magritte’s 1928 painting, “The False Mirror.” 

Samantha Fields, “Portent,” 2024, acrylic on canvas, 24 x 24”.

Fields depicts doubled celestial bodies in “Twin Solo,” with its overlapping Venn diagram of partial eclipses, and “The World Is Not as You See It,” with its twin crescent moons, one seen from a clearing in the cloud cover, and the other seen through it. In “Whole Sky” and “A Light Hurt” the bokeh balls or lens flares beloved of photographers multiply, suggesting optical phenomena like auroras and glories, sun dogs and moon dogs, all of it spiritualized.

Samantha Fields, “The World is Not as You See It,”

2024, acrylic on canvas, 34 x 28”.

Samantha Fields, “Cathedral,”

2024, acrylic on canvas, 12 x 9”.