Review - what if where i am is what i need? — Abrahm Guthrie

In his current exhibition, “What if Where I am is What I Need,” at Between Two Galleries, artist Abrahm Guthrie notes that: “Ultimately this collection of works is about giving attention, attention to the outside world around us and a renewed investigation into the inner world of home.” If one had to boil the work in his show down to a single word, I think it would indeed be “attention”—attention to the little things, to the marks, to the time and space between the time and spaces. And attention to history, and the other painters who paid attention to the little things before him as well.

At his best, Guthrie finds operatic opportunities in the most mundane circumstances. Because of this, the smaller work paradoxically looms largest in the show. Chair, a small ochre-y and umbery still life painting of a chair casually draped with an assortment of garments, soars even at 10 x 8 inches. An online image would lead one to misjudge its scale for sure. It feels bigger than a piece of loose-leaf paper. Guthrie’s paint pushing is unfussy, efficient, spontaneous, and willing to reveal every buttery touch, leaving the viewer with a certain sense of effortlessness. He arrives at similar results with other small woks such as Money Tree, Nurse Logs and Small Plants at Dusk, each with sophisticated palettes of Indian reds, yellow ochres, sap greens, warm greys, tinted down and shaded up. He does wonderful work of locating the glow of natural light in earthy colors … that are somehow between the standard secondary mixtures and combos; the jazz chords and blue notes of painting. Like a Giorgio Morandi or a Chardin; he somehow injects humanity into inanimate subjects simply through how he handles paint. It almost feels the objects and their intimate spaces sacrificed themselves so that paint and touch may live.

Guthrie’s larger landscapes, to which a significant portion of this show is dedicated, celebrate a connection to Wisconsin’s newfound place in his life. As the artist notes: “These last four years the subject of my landscape paintings has been Wisconsin, the glorious blaze of the sun falling behind the trees, towering metallic grain silos, those endless thick fields of fog and most recently the walk to the Milwaukee River, drawing the black locust trees that remind me of where I grew up in Oregon.”

These words ring true in the work, especially in his viewsheds reminiscent of early 20th century American landscape painting. One can’t deny the looming presence of Marsden Hartley and Arthur Dove in Before the Sun Goes Down Over the Driftless and Idle Clouds, with their dark ridges crisply defined against luminous, cloud punctuated skies, half observed, half dreamed, and totally felt. If one is searching for inspiration to capture the eerie twilight in Southwest Wisconsin, these forebears are a glorious place to begin. And still, Guthrie transforms Wisconsin’s the glacially chewed-up terrain into his own peculiar compositions.

I had a wild thought while viewing Guthrie’s exhibition, about the repeated obituaries of painting over the years; how painting always resurfaces in the face of predictions about relational and digital next paradigm. The thought itself came on the heels of another that emerged from having passed so many unmowed lawns sprouting empires of seeding dandelions on my way to the gallery with signs that read, “No Mow May.” Maybe it’s simply the right thing to do, or maybe we’ve finally come to realize that the fertile yellow flowers are beneficial enough to accept them as a welcome necessity rather than as simply unwanted weeds. Perhaps the dandelion merely won a battle of attrition and forced us to listen to its message that if you can’t beat them, you just have to learn to love their permanence. I walked out onto the street thinking that the more painting I see end of history, the more those canvases reveal the infinite possibility of reinterpretation and personal intimacy than the material limitations en route to an uncertain crypto, cyber, digital future. Thanks, Abrahm.

-Shane McAdams