Donald
Jurney was born in Rye, New York, in 1945, and was educated
at Columbia University, the Pratt Institute, and the Art
Students League.
He began his career, nearly
thirty years ago, with a one-man show at a temporary gallery
space in The Hudson House, Cold Spring, New York. A group
of prescient collectors bought up the paintings at prices
from fifty to two hundred dollars. Since then, through more
than twenty subsequent one-man exhibitions, the reception
has been the same — sold-out show after sold-out show.
Jurney’s work is firmly rooted
in the great landscape tradition, stretching from Dutch 17th
century painting through the Barbizon and Hudson River Schools,
to late 19th and early 20th century French and American impressionism.
Nonetheless, one cannot mistake the evidence that his work
is also informed and enlivened by the influence of modern
painting. It is this union, one of timeless motif and of
lively surface, that distinguishes his work from both his
predecessors and his contemporaries, making his paintings
very much of our time, and instantly recognizable.
Particularly in the period
between 1870 and the famous 1913 Armory Show, landscape painting
dominated the world of art. It engaged the viewer with contemporary
views of the world while exploring the intersection between
man and nature. With the arrival of modern painting this
conversation was abandoned, cast aside in favor of a formalist
investigation of the nature of painting itself. With few
exceptions, such as the work of Fairfield Porter, landscape
painting lay virtually dormant for sixty years, until the
1970’s.
At the time Jurney first began,
realist work (and especially landscape painting) was considered
deeply old-fashioned. Art had, apparently, progressed beyond
such quaint notions.
Running counter to that belief,
Jurney was committed to the view that understanding our relationship
to the places around us, having ‘a conversation’ with our
precarious world, was more important than ever before. He
continues to believe that we grow in richness as we train
ourselves to perceive the subtleties of the land, both in
its timelessness and in its ever-shifting vitality. Jurney
invites us to explore what Patrick Kavanagh has called “the
undying difference in the corner of a field.” His paintings
are a summons to celebrate the poetry of the commonplace.
Jurney’s work, like that of
many of the masters he respects, begins with pencil drawings
in the field. Exploring the particulars of a chosen place,
he carefully records the information, which he will later
need in the studio. Sometimes several years will elapse before
the drawing becomes the motif for a new painting. In the
studio, from his deep understanding of the vocabulary of
nature, coupled with a keen sensibility and great skill,
comes a painting with the indelible stamp of a certain day
and hour, of a particular weather, and with a unique sense
of place.
At first glimpse, his work
is profoundly based in traditional landscape painting. But
a closer look reveals that the tree, which we see as millions
of leaves, is, in fact, a dense matrix of quite random marks,
combining to give the impression of great detail. Through
great economy of means, Jurney invites the viewer to enter
into a compact with him, one in which the language of painting
becomes as important as the subject of the picture itself.
Our reward is the pleasure of a traditional realism that
is refreshingly, and surprisingly, animated by the vigor
of abstraction.
Donald Jurney has lived and
worked in the Hudson River Valley, in England, and in the
Berkshires. For a number of years, he has painted extensively
in France. A recent interest has been kindled by a trip to
the West of Ireland, and he has begun exploring the coastal
marshes and the estuaries of Boston’s North Shore.
But wherever
his travels take him, we can be sure of an invitation to
come along, through his paintings, and of the chance to share
his unique vision of the landscape — inspired by his unflagging
enthusiasm for the remarkable world about us. |
