On the WATER

COLLECTOR'S FOCUS SEASCAPES, RIVERS AND LAKES

- JOHN O'HERN

In his book, A Sand County Almanac, the conservationist Aldo Leopold (1887-1948) wrote, "Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language."

The water from mountain springs trickles over rocks to form streams that fill lakes, becomes rivers that flow to the sea and evaporates along the way to form clouds of droplets that eventually become too heavy to stay suspended and fall to the ground as rain. Thomas Cole (1801-1848), emigrated to the U.S. when he was 17 and became the country's first major landscape painter, inspiring a generation of artists who became known as the Hudson River School. In his 1836 "Essay on American Scenery" he wrote, "I will now speak of another component of scenery, without which every landscape is defective-it is water. Like the eye in the human countenance, it is a most expressive feature: in the unrippled lake, which mirrors all surrounding objects, we have the expression of tranquility and peace-in the rapid stream, the headlong cataract, that of turbulence and impetuosity."

John David Wissler's manipulation of the viscosity of paint creates convincing spaces especially when he is in and inspired by the weather on Great Cranberry Island off the coast of Maine. He began painting and drawing as a perfectionist, scrupulously examining every detail As he studied the great landscape painters he began to open up, creating atmosphere and openness.