Chatham ... esq

We went to a wonderful exhibit earlier this week
Dennos Museum Center:

"Poetry of Landscape: The Seasons - Paintings by Russell Chatham"

Here is a review


Then we had a bit of clearing weather this afternoon, which inspired this

Shot just after 6PM
I did some work on exposure to try to catch the "Chatham Feel"



But work by the master is here: Chatham Fine Art

Plaques at the exhibit included the following

“A Russell Chatham painting speaks of necessity. When we see it we know it had to be. We know that this vision could not have been left to languish without being given form. Chatham’s paintings are neither objective nor subjective. They are not a naturalists reporting or rendering of a landscape which endeavors to show us ‘how it really was,’ when of course it wasn’t. it’s as if a consciousness in the landscape itself…in trees and mountains and rivers … breaks free of appearances and speaks through the consciousness of the artist. A circuit is completed… and if we are awake to it… the vision becomes ours.

Dan Gerber – poet, novelist

---

"We cannot look at the land without seeing a Chatham painting ... without his cool and luminescent vision."

Tim Cahll, travel adventure writer

---

"In Russell Chatham's best work the painting is so inconsolably austere and authoritative that we have a choice of turning away or temporarily losing our personalities, the latter which, I propose, is the main reason for enduring a work of art."

Jim Harrison, novelist, screenwriter, poet

"There is no intrusion of the artist, no self-declaration. When I see a Chatham painting I feel my own mind expounded in the natural world. It works the way a good poem works, not to blind or startle or amaze - or as is frequently the case, to bore - but to make us say, 'Ah! Yes. That's right! I had forgotten. Thank You"

Dan Gerber, poet and novelist

---

"What Russell Chatham paints are not landscapes so much as self-portraits of the mountains and sky and plains. His work is deceptively simple. We don't look at a Chatham painting and say it looks like a particular place in Montana or California - places he has chiefly worked. It shows us how to look at Montana or California with new eyes. 'The landscape listens,' as Emily Dickinson said, 'and we hear it call our own name.'"

Dan Gerber, poet and novelist

---

"All really good painting is spiritual... A painter has to look inside for his subject...into the private, poetic vein that's essential to a true artist."

Russell Chatham


All of the above ring true, and trigger my desire to capture some of the same visions
Different medium, and all I can try to do is "capture the moment" then tweak the settings a bit here and there.