Laura Wooten: View from the Ridge - PDF Flipbook

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Second Street Gallery is a 501(c)3 nonprofit art organization that presents
exhibitions of contemporary art and related education programs to Central Virginia.
SSG receives funding from individuals, businesses, and foundations through its
fundraising and membership and through local and national grants, including the
Virginia Commission for the Arts.

Curated by
Kristen Chiacchia

In late September of 2016, I made the life-changing move from Brooklyn, New York to Charlottesville,
Virginia to take the position of Second Street Gallery’s new Executive Director. Not only was I
transitioning from a major commercial art gallery to a small non-profit art space; urban life to a small
town; trading the North for the South; I was also moving to a place where I would have the opportunity
to experience the four seasons for the first time in almost 20 years.

A commonly shared joke concerns New York City’s quick switch to winter from summer and back again
without any transition. It’s a world with only two actual seasons: hot and humid summers, where the
blistering sun beats down on the concrete jungle with no respite, and the grey, gloomy, cold, and windy
winter months where much of the city seems plagued by Seasonal Affective Disorder.

Yet watching the seasons change in Central Virginia my first year here was a wholly different and
thoroughly captivating experience—one that helped to ease the transition from my former life in New York
City. I think the area’s splendor is also what drew me to the work of Laura Wooten, particularly her View
from the Ridge series. The striking beauty of Central Virginia’s natural landscape is reflected in Wooten’s
paintings, which purposefully embody the intricate colors, forms, and locales that they are meant to evoke.

I am thrilled to have the opportunity to present Wooten’s View from the Ridge series of painting in its
entirety at Second Street Gallery. These 99 works, depicting winter, spring, summer, and fall, tell a story of
our ever-changing landscape. I invite viewers to share in the journey of this incredibly rich body of work
that is both quintessentially Virginian and evocative of the age-old idea that the only constant in our lives is
change.

Kristen Chiacchia, Executive Director & Chief Curator, Second Street Gallery

Kristen Chiacchia received her BA in the History of Art & Architecture from the University of Pittsburgh and her MA in Modern
and Contemporary Art: Critical and Curatorial Studies at Columbia University. She also completed a Certificate in Appraisal
Studies in Fine and Decorative Arts at New York University. Chiacchia is the Executive Director & Chief Curator of Second
Street Gallery in Charlottesville, Virginia. Prior to joining Second Street Gallery, she was Director at Edward Tyler Nahem
Fine Art in New York, where she organized numerous exhibitions of works by contemporary artists and masters of Abstract
Expressionism and Pop Art.

“No (one) ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and
(she) is not the same (person).”
—Heraclitus, circa 500 BCE (when every sentient being was presumed to be a man.)

LAURA WOOTEN practices a simple daily ritual: taking her dog for a walk along the street that

leads to the winding entrance into her neighborhood. Each day, the same view presents itself as they
reach the crest of the land’s rise. A long stretch of horizon crosses a rural thoroughfare below to
meander over a piece of tended farmland, ultimately concluding at a distant, lavender-hued mountain.
This scene awaits the pair’s circadian visit, offering the artist and her companion its silent, waiting
inspiration and benediction.

Many neighbors come and go along this same route, likely also walking their dogs, and they would
probably say, Oh yes, I know that view from the top of the hill very well. But here is the thing about that
view (and countless others that nature in its grand beneficence offers): it is essentially unknowable, as
Laura Wooten’s series of ninety 8-by-8-inch paintings of its many moods, stages, and secrets proves.
Regardless of certain reliable formal attributes—that snaking road, those guardian evergreens and
far-away mountain range—every passing moment is continually un-familiarizing it, envisioning a new
portrait for itself by the painter and the poet.

Laura Wooten describes her own sensory experience, and the effort to capture it once back in her

studio, as feeling miraculous. The resulting richly
textural series of seductive miniature portals of
the place-across-the-way gives us her insightful
inner awareness of place, time, light, temperature,
atmosphere, hue, and form, as well as her keen
ability to recapture and re-witness it all in paint,
to expose and reinterpret that ephemeral miracle
of a vista for each of us.

The style and temperament of Wooten’s
landscapes seem at first glance to be principally
Western, retaining coincidences from the
Romantic period’s favored “pastoral” views
of man’s dominion (typically portrayed in
tended, managed lands) or that period’s
alternative representations of the “sublime”
aspects of nature—those proposing a powerful,
unpredictable, and sacred (feminine) force at
work. These paintings do contain both of those
18th-century avenues to landscape philosophy
and poesy.

A plowed field and a paved road might suggest some manly dominion took place, yes—but moving
forward through the story of art, no passing vehicle, sign, litter, or any other modern symbol of the
individual freedoms and evidences of America’s own subsequently noisy, ironic “Enlightenment, etc.”
will be found within these small, window-shaped memories—only the endless and potent evanescence
of conditions and experience.

As the seasons turn in Wooten’s continuum of paintings, something else resides beyond the changes
in leaf color and weather, and other such characteristics of time—something that is not very Western
and is generally eschewed by Western art history. It is the very notion of experiential repetition.
Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans and Marilyns do not qualify for the kind of repetition that this series
of explorations considers. This is consumerism of a different sort: hors d’oeuvres of the metaphysical
served in a square realm with edges.

Wooten’s process is significantly more Eastern in approach, morphing repetitious observation into
meditation, and then into revelation.

In Eastern thought, Chinese painting is the application of a philosophy that seeks to penetrate the
profound—the mysteries of nature and the universe—rather than to constantly reward original expression
and novelty. That type of painting has been described as one in which the artist, rather than precisely
remarking on the landmarks and details of a scene, participates in the symbolic expression of nature’s
gesture. Taoism, from which this philosophy springs, blends concepts of cosmology, correspondences,
balance, and the relationship of human consciousness with the fluctuating rhythms of the universe.

Thus, in Chinese painting, artists traditionally return to the same scene—to listen to and observe its
elements, fine-tune their own consciousness, and expand their sensitivity and skills to render the
landscape full and glowing with quiet energy and mysticism. Mountains, old trees, forms and bodies of
water, and shadow and light draw references to the harmonies of both nearby nature and the greater,
intangible cosmos.

These are all phenomena that breathe oxygen and spirit into and from the topography of Laura
Wooten’s landscapes. The guardian evergreens guide the viewers’ path and lift them upward above the
plain of each painting to gaze deeper into its horizon, while terms shift and change: as green becomes
orange becomes gray becomes pale chartreuse becomes green again. As the sycamores in the middle-
distance fence line slowly grow from panel to panel to reach their branches toward each other’s
crowns, turning their proverbial shyness into intimacy. As the purple mountain calls to the clouds and
they determine how to reciprocate. And as the ever-winding road laid before both artist and viewer,
once asphalt, becomes a shimmering river or inviting path that Taoism might even call “The Way.” It is a
way that is made to be taken and followed, allowing each of these paintings to sample the idea of “qi,”
or “ch’i”—the inner, activating forces within all matter.

As John Voigt explains in his recent essay, “Qi in Chinese Painting”: For thousands of years a
fundamental method used in creating and evaluating (Chinese) paintings has been the artist observing,
contemplating and communing with the qi of their subject—then having that qi fill their being—then
leading and guiding that qi into their arms, hands and fingers into the controlling of the brush—then
onto the paper, canvas, or silk, so that the viewer of the completed art object feels a sympathetic

resonance with the qi of the subject of the painting. At
its highest manifestation this becomes a transcendental
experience of exultation where the qi of the subject, artist,
process, painting, and observer merge and become as one.

It is not too great a stretch to leap across eras, oceans,
datelines, and hemispheres to suggest that Laura Wooten’s
current series of explorations into the transformative spirit
of the land that beckons her brush and palette knife has
an abiding correspondence with this ancient, abundant
philosophy of art.

Deborah McLeod, Owner and Director, Chroma Projects Art Laboratory

Deborah McLeod is currently the owner and director of
Chroma Projects in Charlottesville. She has served as curator
for numerous art centers and art organizations throughout
Virginia, D.C. and Maryland over the past thirty years.
McLeod also regularly contributed art reviews and criticism
to Baltimore City Paper, Art Papers, Style Magazine, and
The Virginian Pilot Ledger Star during that period, and
periodically published articles in Sculpture Magazine and
Ceramics: Art & Perception. She is also the Curator/Organizer
for FLOW: The Rivanna River Arts Festival.



“Suddenly an experience of disinterested observation
opens in its center and gives birth to a happiness
which is instantly recognizable as your own. The field
that you are standing before appears to have the same
proportions as your own life.”

—John Berger, “Field,” About Looking

THE VIEW FROM THE RIDGE has captivated me for over a decade, inviting me to pause with my dog at

the same spot each day. We follow the neighborhood sidewalk around a bend, begin our descent of a long, steep hill,
and there it reveals itself: a shimmering, beckoning tableau. As the start of 2019 approached, I began returning to the
studio to put down my impressions. Over the course of the year, 90 small works were completed. Each painting began
with a specific recollection of color, light, and weather but evolved in its own direction. Some paintings retained the
fresh immediacy of the moment, while others conflated multiple days or blurred into the distillations of memory and
imagination. The field across the road displayed a range of soft grays in the winter, an exhilarating chartreuse in the
spring, deep saturated greens in the summer, and a radiant golden glow in the fall. Each season brought new colors and
atmospheres. Each hour, new glances of sunlight and shapes of shadow. Each moment, a unique opportunity.

Despite my penchant for exuberant high-contrast color palettes, I soon learned to embrace the subtly shifting neutrals of
foggy mornings and overcast skies. The springtime provided translucent glazes of warm rain, then playful splashes of clear
pink. Painting patiently through the monotonous greens of humid summer days, I was startled one morning to find vivid
stripes of red-orange clay, my palette unexpectedly invigorated by a freshly plowed field. As the leaves began to fall in
autumn, caught up in the sweep of the wind, my brushstrokes took on new and unfamiliar rhythms. Each day I felt inspired
and expectant, grateful for whatever gifts might be offered. Observing the mercurial atmospheres of the outer world and
the fickle weather of my own thoughts and emotions, I found myself able and willing to tenderly examine both the outer
and the inner landscapes. It was from this centered place that I could always make the next painting.

At the close of the year, I was not ready to leave the view behind. After so many miles of walking and witnessing, this
landscape had papered the background of my mind, embossed with the imprints of meditation, rumination, and reflection.
Both naturalistic and surreal imaginings overlaid the vista in the landscape of my consciousness, an inner world built
from the assimilation of nature, memory, and dreams. In 2020, the series continued onto larger square panels that held
the potentialities of fire and flood, the most delicate of springs and the starkest of winters—an increasingly volatile yet
urgently beautiful world. Giant evergreens stand aside, holding back the curtains, unveiling a pageant of color and emotion
that emanates from the inseparable vibrations of nature and human life.

Laura Wooten, October 2020

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Detail of Ochre Stillness

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Detail of Silver and Gold

DDeetataililooffTSuinlvderraand Gold

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Detail of Arrival

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Detail of Leaning In/Leafing Out

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Detail of Meadow Music

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