Ralph Carpentier: The Power of Landscape Painting
by Robert Long, The East Hampton Star, 2000
Reprinted by permission of The East Hampton Star.
Once you’ve seen Ralph Carpentier’s work, you can’t walk on the East End of Long Island without feeling as if you’ve strayed into one of his paintings. He has cited the 17th-century Dutch tradition of landscape painting as an early influence, and in that tradition, he reanimates what we see before us and makes us see it in a new way.
That an artist can render a realistic image of a place is one thing, but for that image to resonate visually and emotionally is quite another. Carpentier accomplishes both in a style that is uniquely his own.
What makes his paintings magical is their seeming effortlessness. Carpentier’s style is not demonstrative in the way Expressionism or Cubism might be. His pictures are unexpectedly subversive: the technique is so strong that it takes a minute to get beyond the surface and begin to see the paintings in all of their expressive power.
This mastery is the result of decades of working against the grain of what has been popular in the art world since the hey-day of Abstract Expressionism. Although Carpentier came of age smack in the middle of that important time, he worked his way through the pervasive influences of the day: his artistic compass sent him on the road to make what we recognize today as a Carpentier landscape.
The critic John Gruen referred to Carpentier’s oils as “lessons in the way nature can be structured to encompass both emotional response and technical fervor . . . There is a crispness here,” Gruen continues, “and a feel for atmosphere that invariably rings true.”
Gruen’s perception is affirmed throughout this exhibit [August 19 – September 5, 2000, Lizan
Tops Gallery, East Hampton NY], which shows Carpentier at the height of his powers. One look at The Artist in the Landscape, for example, tells us something about his extraordinary draftsmanship, his compositional acuity, his way with color, and it tells us, too, of his feelings for the natural world.
In this large painting, there is a meticulously rendered field in the foreground that, in a blast of sun, unexpectedly grows dreamy and smooth as the eye travels back toward the horizon. A long, subtle curve of hedge, dotted with autumnal color, wends sinuously across the canvas and behind it, while a procession of farm buildings in clear light structures the composition. The sky is grayish-white toward the horizon but gains in blue as it rises, where a singular scrap of cumulus cloud floats in a sea of color. The sheer painterliness of that cloud is exhilarating. Carpentier is known for his big, gorgeous skies and that evocative cloud is part of it.
There are two figures in this painting, and it is typical of Carpentier to paint small figures in a big landscape. They help to personalize the composition and remind us, as Carpentier has said, “of man’s diminutive stature in nature.”
In all of Carpentier’s paintings, his genius is in the evocation of mood, in which the familiar world is seen in new and stirring ways. That singularity – his ability to clearly and powerfully take the specific and make it universal – is what makes Carpentier a master of landscape painting.
