Cologne-born, Somerville-based Wilhelm Neusser is not a landscape painter—at least not in the traditional sense—though he does render specific geographical locales in his work. Instead, Neusser—who exhibits widely and lectures in art, painting, and drawing at Boston University—deploys this genre as a means of confronting climate change, evoking interior experience, and reflecting on the sublime in nature. A group show at Corey Daniels Gallery in Wells, Maine (on view through August 31, though Neusser’s work will remain there through the fall), highlights his orange marsh paintings and a dozen smaller “night vision” paintings redolent with emerald shades.
Neusser is refreshingly open and generous about his inspirational sources, conceding that his unique style synthesizes, among other things, European and American Romanticism, the Hudson River School, Edvard Munch’s red skies, and techniques developed by postwar German painters like Gerhard Richter and Anselm Kiefer. I spoke with Neusser while he was visiting family in Cologne. What follows are excerpts from that conversation, during which the artist dove into his interest in landscape as a tool for exploring the liminal spaces between the conscious and subconscious; between dreaming and awareness; between the awe that nature inspires and its terrifying beauty.
Jorge Arango: Your earlier paintings had a lot to do with the way you blocked or granted access to the viewer with what was in the foreground. These paintings don’t have anything to do with that as far as I can see. You’re really inviting the viewer way into this vast depth. You want to talk first a little bit about the transition from the early paintings into this?
Wilhelm Neusser: You’re totally right that the orange marshes, especially through the kind of meandering canals going to the distance, lure us in towards the horizon line. But at the same time, through this kind of smoky wildfire atmosphere, we get sucked into the area where the heat and the danger is the most extreme, a hard-to-define, somewhat scary and anxiety-inducing environment. And the horizon line actually doesn’t really exist. It’s kind of disappearing into orange or brown hues.
JA: So those paintings, they’re not actual landscapes, they’re fantastical spaces.
WN: It’s not a description of place. I would call it a concept of a landscape. I am a big fan of landscapes by Martin Johnson Heade, of the Hudson River School. They were beautiful and relatively small, and they often had dramatic skies. If you see one or two or three, or if you see them online side by side, it’s amazing because it becomes very conceptual, and that’s an inspiration beyond the fact that the motif of the marsh is inspiring and similar.
JA: I can also see Frederic Edwin Church in there, and some of the green parts of the marshes feel like George Inness.
WN: What an interesting guy.
JA: But also there is a sort of supernatural feeling to them that is sometimes more like Caspar David Friedrich, for example. There’s a sense of the sublime in those canvases. Is that also something you’re going for?
WN: Totally. The idea that the experience of nature can have this overwhelming sentiment where the awe and the fear overlap, which was feeding into Romanticism on both sides of the Atlantic. Friederich is almost like a religious meditation, while I feel Church is much more theatrical and dramatic. So yes, all of these are sources of inspiration.
Fourteen years ago, I moved from Cologne, where I grew up, to the US. I learned that a lot of the Hudson River School painters came to Germany, mostly Düsseldorf and Munich, to study under painting professors here. Bierstadt, who was born in Germany, moved to New Bedford with his family, but came back to Düsseldorf to study. And Emanuel Leutze, who painted Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851), the giant canvas in the Met, says in a lower corner “Painted in Düsseldorf.” It’s an interesting connection.
So yes, the idea of nature and especially this kind of twilight moment in nature as an indicator of the experience of transition, but also of uncertainty, fear, angst, anxiety. The landscape almost serves as a psychological space of projection. Our inner landscape is turned inside out and projected onto the vast landscape in front of us. It’s more about a place that comes from inside. Compared to previous series, I pushed the anxiety factor even more, especially through the intense kind of orangey, fiery hues. I mean, I would argue they’re not super easy to digest. They’re pretty intense.
JA: You also mentioned that you’re constantly absorbing history and news. Is there anything in these paintings that has to do with actual environmental cautions that we’re experiencing now?
WN: We see images a lot. Right now in Cologne we see [fires] coming from Spain and Greece. We see them coming from either Canada or California. Last year we had fires in Beverly, right north of Boston. And the idea that big fires kind of stain the color of the sky is not that farfetched. But it’s more subconscious, like this sense of tightness of heat, not being able to breathe, and how that might translate into an anxiety-inducing color.
JA: That’s interesting though, because to me, the idea of tightness and not being able to breathe is claustrophobic. These paintings don’t feel claustrophobic. They feel really expansive.
WN: There’s that concept of luring you in. And then I think at the same time, it’s kind of coming at you. That’s why I hope that maybe the intensity of the hue and the way that it’s kind of smoky, will start to push in the other direction and give you a little bit of a choke.
JA: What about the application of paint itself?
WN: Quite rough. And I really liked that you mentioned Inness because I’m a huge fan of his work when it comes to really treating the canvas roughly. It looks like he’s applying, rubbing, scraping back, applying again. There’s something to that that I really love. It’s like a Courbet because, for me, it’s not just painting nature, it’s also about the nature of painting.
There’s something about the topography of the landscape, the actual material landscape on the canvas where you have ridges and little valleys and different types of sheen. There is a nice parallel with the surface between form and content compared to the roughness of the nature depicted. They also recall, in a more contemporary sense, Gerhard, Richter, and Anselm Kiefer—obviously artists that I admired when I was twelve or so.
JA: So the green paintings. Let’s talk about how you came about this idea of night vision.
WN: It’s like the experience of memories of places where we’ve been, very fleeting moments of a landscape seen through the flickering of a fluorescent light. We see glimpses but they never seem to stay. They’re very abstract, very rough. You’re in this world where there is this kind of night vision effect. So, the series is based on that idea. It’s about memory of place, but the memory is kind of awake, maybe kind of dreamlike, not illuminated enough.
JA: So here we are seeing your landscapes, but then these feel like marine creatures to me floating above them. And I don’t know if that was an intention. What are these forms to you?
WN: They’re coming out of a very random kind of move using a spatula or straight edge on the panel or canvas. And again, I guess Richter’s research and technique is a backdrop to this, that you move the paint around and allow for purposefully random forms coming out of the painterly process. And that’s where the nature of painting takes over the painting of nature.
So, you could read it as swimming sea creatures. You could see it as clouds above a horizon. We’re in such a fleeting, abstract realm here that it doesn’t matter. We’re in so many different locations.
JA: And the scratched lighter parts?
WN: The notion that understanding or seeing clearly is about light, so obviously darkness would be the opposite. In a technical sense, I’m using a rule or a straight edge and then a pallet knife. I scratch into the darker paint back down to the white panel. It’s literally working my way through the dark back to the light, creating this moment of lightning enlightenment.
JA: The word that’s coming to mind is somnambulance, a sort of half-sleep, this kind of dreaming-waking state, right? It’s suspended within time and space.
WN: I think that’s beautiful. And then from there, it’s not far to a submarine-underwater kind of experience. And I come back to the idea of twilight as a reference in the nineteenth-century for a metaphorical moment of change.
