alix bacon is a painter and land conservationist living in sargeantsville, new jersey

alix@njconservation.org

908. 328 .6406

Spots Striped down to Stripes

Alix Bacon's paintings emerge between observation and recollection.  The islands and hills, the trees and rocks, the water and skies that she paints blend the sharp focus of experience with the smooth contours of memory.  The views reflect a certain common experience of the northeast:  a spot of seasonal visits, where places are always already imbued with nostalgia, and cherished, easygoing days slip away in a blink.

Noticeably lacking figures, and not giving the impression of imminent event, the scenes are not settings for action — rather, they are scenes as action.  The action is that of the isolated observer who consumes and reproduces place as psychic substance.  In paintings such as Twin Pines and Dutch Weir Alix distills solitary moments of intense optical experience into liquid ribbons and creamy strokes of saturated color.

From long practice, Alix has established a balance in her painting between rendering the texture of actuality and working with pictorial conventions.  She has a method for translating the experience generated by particular locations into representational schemes.  In her work, the world surfaces as a fluid color substance assembled into discernible familiar patterns.  Smoothing the  specificity of local features into broad color schemes simultaneously idealizes and erodes, a telling duality.

This duality clues us into an aim inherent in the works. Alix speaks of sketching quickly on site, seeking the experience of being present in a particular place, stalking the genius loci.  She later refines the sketches in the studio, intensifying the moment. The resulting images evince the complex temporality that imbues the landscapes she takes as her subject.  A wave crashes on a rock, a momentary event; yet the rock, the waves, the shore exist in a span of long duration, identified with geological time.  By bracketing out features that could stamp a date on the places she depicts and submerging details in favor of an assembly of formal relations, Alix unveils the elemental shimmering within the everyday.

Although they are not grandiose, immersive works, it would be a mistake to ignore the ambition at play in these small, humble gems.  In her practice, landscape is no mere pretext, but it shares the frame with another equally strong focus: pure painting.  The assertion of paint in itself, which has always informed Alix's technique, calls to mind what a writer once remarked about the work of John Constable: "it is evident that Mr. Constable's landscapes are like nature; it is still more evident that they are like paint."    

While Alix directs her gaze to the landscape she turns it equally toward art.  In Pond Waters and TITLE, we can see the balance swing from representation toward abstraction.  Swabs of color unfettered from the task of depiction, becoming pure pattern, cast her activity in a new light.  As Alix's works become more abstract she reveals to us the ground of her creativity.  Her paintings offer vivid proof that the pleasure to be had in gazing at the water or drinking in a sunset can also abide in a brushstroke.

 – Jonathan Miller,  Turtle Gallery 

Where we're you?

Alix Bacon has a deft hand when it comes to coaxing the spirit of a place to reside in slathers of paint.  When she layers colors into harmonies giving shape to hilly contours, calm waters and lofty skies, she works within the well-established tradition of landscape painting.  Her paintings of Scotland and Maine depict tranquil terrains, opening vistas onto the natural world in all its richness.  These works invite us to gaze at countryside, unmarked by signs of time, or human presence.   

Of course, the impression of human absence and timelessness is a fiction: the painter was there, the terrain was hardly untouched.  Though these paintings contain no figures, we are present in them.  Landscape, it has been said, is a way of seeing, implying a viewer whose gaze frames a view. Even at its most seemingly innocent, we know this gaze is never ahistorical, politically neutral or free of desire.  Anything we label 'landscape' is man-made.

The Maine paintings, framed in window-like panes, complicate the viewer's position vis- à-vis the landscape. The paintings are no longer simply transparent windows on the world; their identity as windows is made evident.  The frames assert the distance between seer and seen.  This distance is significant, and raises a question.  Is there any way to look out at something and call it nature ? In her climate apocalypse paintings, Alix seeks an answer.

In the delimited scope of a landscape, environmental crisis does not always meet the eye.  Today might be a beautiful day — it's easy to forget that the air is polluted, the seas are choked with plastic debris, species are disappearing.  Far away, glaciers were melting while the painter gazed at the placid rocks, trees and water of the Northeast.  

To paint the environment, and not just a landscape, Alix takes up new tools.  No longer content to stay behind the window looking out at the landscape with the artist's gaze, she plunges in, shedding the artist's fictional cloak of invisibility — and as she does, she pulls us along with her.  She takes us aloft, so our view can encompass a panorama of destruction.  She teams up with heroes, goddesses, and champions.  In this re-enchanted world, the classical meets the contemporary: animals file onto Noah's ark as rising waters engulf skyscrapers.

The anecdotes of mythology and religion have always served to make sense of human action.  Myths tame the chaos of the world by giving it form; they admonish and instruct.  Here is what happens when hubris takes hold and you fly too close to the sun with wings held together by wax.  The weak can defeat the strong — here is how to do it.  Call on Wonder Woman, backed up by her Olympians, to save the day!  Stop staring at a screen and look at the mess we have to clean up!

By making them anecdotal, Alix transforms her landscape paintings into a provocation.  She shows that we bear a responsibility to the landscapes in which we always, indelibly, appear.  Like the famous 1915 British recruiting poster that posed the question "Daddy what did you do during the Great War?", the raw agitation of the climate paintings and their turn to the bold figures and emblematic moments of myth and legend allow Alix to frame a similar question —  "Where were you during the climate apocalypse?"

– Jonathan Miller, Turtle Gallery