THE LANDSCAPES

Let me state right at the start and this is not said lightly or casually. Murray Zimiles’ recent landscapes, dating from 2002, are as visually and intellectually rich as any being painted today. Period.* When discussing his works, Zimiles, a compassionate and intellectually curious person, is delighted to discuss, he even revels in, the reciprocal effects his varying methods of paint application have on the multi-layered meanings implicit in each painting. There is a constant play back and forth between surface effects and implied, but never directly stated, content, between the eye and the mind and the eye and the imagination.

Let us imagine the creation of a Zimiles landscape painting. Although he walks daily in the landscape around his rural home, he rarely sketches scenes. Rather, he prefers to create from memory. In the studio, he initially “attacks” a canvas, making ink marks and splattering and pouring pigments often in as many as ten layers. In effect, he wants to violate the surface to see what it might “reveal.” At some moment, the marks on the surface begin to take shape and to suggest additional forms, colors, and meanings. The work, in effect, then takes over, or, to say it differently, nature begins to take over.  Zimiles is clear about this last point. There are no houses or people that might locate the work in a particular time or a place. It is nature revealing itself through the artist.

What does it reveal? Depending on which shapes and colors are emerging, the mood might be one suggesting the chaos at the beginning of creation, a primeval wilderness, or a domestic landscape with its ribboned rows suggesting cultivated fields. But Zimiles is not a disembodied stream of consciousness in front of his canvas. It is not that easy. A superb technician, he controls the pouring and splattering and brushing very carefully, often re-doing and then re-doing again small sections until each comes into perfect balance with adjacent sections until the entire painting seems to have made itself, until the artist paints himself out of the picture. He does not allow mistakes. Underlying his combination of random and controlled gestures is his desire to enliven and activate surfaces. Pigment is purposefully thinned and thickened—he loves working with the materiality of pigments—and he will “torque” forms, bend and twist them, allow them to rise or descend abruptly, in order to make a work’s structure or composition all the more interesting and purposely disorienting.

Animals, which Zimiles has included in his paintings since 1996, are also meant to confuse the sense of time and place in a painting. All are American animals—including the camels which have gone wild after being abandoned by Hollywood film crews—but often do not cast shadows or might appear too large or too small for their presumed positions in space, thus adding a measure of purposeful spatial dislocation to a scene. Some are too vague to identify, particularly in the later landscapes.

       Now, here we run into some really interesting conundrums. They are American animals, certainly the buffalos are, but their presence does not necessarily mean Zimiles paints the American landscape—although he might. They appear in what can only be called sublime, primeval scenes suggesting the beginnings of a timeless time as well as in domestic scenes suggesting the measured times of planting and harvesting. They appear in scenes evocative of the American southwest and Northeast, of volcanic or geyser-like eruptions and pleasant, rolling hillsides as well as of, eons earlier, the separation of the earth’s surface into land and sea or sky and water. The animals, then, seem to have been present before Creation which raises issues concerning Geological Time and Biblical Time—if one wants to think along those lines. Zimiles wants to raise this and other issues without resolving them because he wants viewers to bring their own thoughts to these works.

 A group of paintings provokes further consideration here. These are the paintings in which rays of sunlight emanate from the sun. In nineteenth-century American paintings by artists such as Frederick Church, these fanlike rays symbolized the presence of God and therefore heavenly blessings on the American nation inhabiting the land below. Zimiles relates that his father, when confronted by a resplendent landscape illuminated by such a sky, would point to it and ask: how can one not believe in God? Zimiles’ answers and his thoughts on the matter are his own business, but these paintings do invoke the twin notions of forces beyond the scope of mortals and of providing the landscape with spiritual dimensions that reach beyond manipulations of surface techniques and suggestions of earthbound subject matter. Further, because these landscapes connect directly to nineteenth-century antecedents, they are modern updates of  an important American landscape tradition. This is not to say, as one must in 2008, that Zimiles is a religious conservative, a full-blown traditionalist, or a patriot, but rather that for all his attention to both post-modern deflected and open-ended meanings as well as to contemporary stylistic methods of paint application, his work can be shown to lie comfortably within the history of American landscape painting.

Its transcendent spiritual qualities aside, light needs to be considered in another way. In a painting, light is revealed through color. It was another nineteenth-century conceit to think of light, especially in paintings of the still undefiled West, as symbolizing American futurity, the illimitable possibilities of a nation still in formation. As a twenty-first century person, Zimiles has seen the results and has no illusions, but as an artist who applies paint to canvas he is fascinated by light. It illuminates, reveals, blurs, blinds and can suggest literal and figurative horizons beyond imagination both in an individual’s inner space and in outer space that exists well beyond America’s physical borders. Light is malleable for Zimiles and it speaks to his sense of creativity whether artistic or scientific in nature. It illuminates the present as it hints at future possibilities.

What all of this boils down to is this: Zimiles’ imagination is broad and wide enough to allow a viewer’s imagination to roam freely. His paintings bear repeated viewings because each one allows a viewer to take off on different, sometimes contradictory, tangents. One can marvel at his craft while simultaneously getting lost in a dialogue with a canvas. You speak to it, as it were, it speaks back to you. As stated at the top of this essay, his landscapes are as visually and intellectually rich as any being produced today.

Matthew Baigell

*I am happy to acknowledge that several observations offered here grew from a conversation with the artist in his studio on February 3, 2008. My opening statement is, of course, entirely my own unprompted opinion.

Matthew Baigell is professor emeritus, art history, Rutgers University. He has written or edited twenty books and numerous articles on American and contemporary Russian art. He has written books on landscape artists Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, Charles Burchfield, and Thomas Hart Benton as well as articles on Cole, Benton, Frederick Church, George Inness, and the landscape artists in the Alfred Stieglitz circle.