By John Oberlin, ABN Intern
DANA POINT, CA--Every morning, as Cliff Wassmann walked
through the doors to the Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia
on his way to class, he would see Frederic Edwin Church's "Cotopaxi"
painting of the smoke-bellowing South American volcano the
piece is named after. Ever since then, Church and the other
painters in the Hudson River School, a group of
mid-19th-century landscape painters, have been a guiding
inspiration through Wassmann's painting career.
 Today,
he strives to achieve the quality of such 19th-century
masters, who like Wassmann, provided the public with images it
might not otherwise have seen.
Wassmann, who will be among the SOLO artists at Artexpo New
York, says that when people do not know about a place, they
may not care about its existence. He adds, people remember a
painting of a place better than a photograph because of the
emotion the painter can put into it. And, by remembering,
people have more of an appreciation for these unique, and
sometimes endangered, parts of the world.
 Wassmann has traveled across the United States and to Italy,
Greece, Mexico and Easter Island in Chile, photographing
diverse landscapes as well as man-made structures. His most
recent painting muse is the white, rough terrain of
Antarctica. "The abstract shapes there are amazing," he says,
referring to the icebergs. He traveled there in 1998 to take
photographs. But the photography never sold. "Last year I had
a creative crisis, so I started to paint the Antarctica
photos, and everything just clicked then."
Although
he paints from photographs, he specifically does not want to
create a painting that looks like a photograph. "Photography
is a machine to duplicate reality -- a painting is so much
more than that," he says. "With painting, I can manipulate the
colors and the softness of a line to create an illusion of
depth better than a photograph."
To create paintings more realistic than photographs, Wassmann
uses techniques such as blurring lines and changing colors to
create more motion and depth. He considers his direct
experience of a place to be most important when painting from
a photograph.
 When
he took the photograph on which his painting "Afterglow -
Lemere Channel" was based, he saw vibrant pinks and purples in
the sky. But when the photo came out, the colors did not
accurately represent the sky he had experienced. So he
referred to his mental memory of the place. "You have to be in
nature to paint nature," he says. "There's no way you can work
through photographs."
To paint a place, you have to be there to experience it, he
says. And not just as long as it takes to snap a couple
photographs. Wassmann tries to stay in one place for a week to
experience it in different light, at different times of day
and through different weather patterns. "I love being out in
these places," he says.
Wassmann plans on making a trip to Alaska soon because its
landscapes are similar to those found in Antarctica, and
people will be more likely to recognize those landscapes.
"People buy what they know," he says. "Some customers buying
the Antarctica pieces live in Alaska, and they appreciate the
work more."
He plans to go back to Antarctica before anywhere else and is
applying for an artist's grant from the International Polar
Year (IPY), an organization dedicating 2007 and 2008 to
studying the polar regionā€™s interaction with the
environment, ecosystems and societies.
"To have any hope of understanding the current global
climate and what might happen in future," reads the IPY Web
site, "the science community needs a better picture of
conditions at the poles and how they interact with and
influence the oceans, atmosphere and land masses." And
Wassmann wants to literally do that.
Since childhood Wassmann has been conscious of the changing
environment around him. "Growing up in New Jersey, we were
surrounded by swamp Since childhood Wassmann has been
conscious of the changing environment around him.
 "Growing up
in New Jersey, we were surrounded by swamp -- what they call
wetlands now -- and we watched suburbia get built over it.
Then I moved to California in `82 and watched the same thing
happen there," he says. "Everywhere I go, I see everything
disappearing."
He even witnessed the ice-capped South Pole disappearing when
he and a group of travelers
spotted a patch of green grass -- an unfamiliar sight, he
says, in Antarctica.
His "Livin' on the Edge" painting of a penguin coming
precariously close to the edge of a massive glacier is
symbolical on more than one level. Not only is it a literal
depiction of the often-debated environmental impact of global
warming, but it is also a figurative depiction of Wassman's
own life.
Many in his life have doubted his career as a painter, which
he jumped headlong into five years ago. Between 2000 and 2001
he worked for an Internet company. "Then 9-11 happened and the
net crashed all around the same time. That really made me look
at my life and question what I wanted to do."
So he decided to buy a gallery space to work out of in Dana
Point, CA, and "almost lost everything." But he says this year
has been a good year. "It's taken five years to get here," he
says. "No one believes in you in this kind of career. I took
the risk; I went to the edge." See more
of Cliff Wassmann's art on his web site at
http://www.artseek.com/index.html. |
