Artist Takes The Long View

The vivid colors make the title of Susan Newbold’s piece — Island Magic — appropriate enough, but Newbold’s treatment of the subject moves the image well beyond a travel postcard. There’s enough information in the texture of the painting that, with a small imaginative leap, the viewer can be on that coastline, feel the grit of the sand, the roughness of the rocks, the cool water. It’s not just a picture of a place; it’s a record of Newbold’s experience of being there.

<em>Island Magic</em> is a small part of ​“Reveries, Journaling in Place,” a large, engrossing exhibit of two decades of Susan Newbold’s work running now at City Gallery on Upper State Street through Jan. 2. In addition to several large pieces ranging from pen and ink to paints to mixed media, Newbold includes copies of her new book, Reveries, as well as a stack of the illuminated journals from which the book is drawn. The pieces, all told, reveal an artist who seems to throw her senses wide open in the creation of her art. In doing so, they allow the viewer a chance to walk in her shoes, see through her eyes, and get a small taste of what she thought and felt in going to the places she visited — from India and New Zealand to the Maine coast — making friends, and growing as an artist.

“When I look back on my 20 years of illuminated journaling, I realize my focus has been on four subjects I visited — trees, plants, water, and landscape. ​‘Reveries’ is a reflection on each of those themes that I hope inspires the viewer’s own journaling experience,” Newbold writes in an accompanying statement. Her artistic choices ​“depend upon the mood, temperature, intimacy and the majesty of a place. After spending time in a location — attempting to capture it and make it one’s own — it belongs to you. You are the interpreter. Viewers see your unique vision. An image transports them to a place you experienced through its smells, textures, colors, light and energy.”

That flooding of the sense is on ample display, as Newbold switches up her technique from subject to subject. In <em>Anderson Ranch Winter,</em> the bold textures of the coastline give way to a serene night sky, the stark shapes of bare trees rendered almost like calligraphy.

She changes her technique again, mixing painting, printing, and photography to render the sense of palm trees in Central America.

And changes yet again, to capture the jumbled density of Maine woods. She brings the same attention to texture when she focuses on individual plants, or species of mushrooms, making them into a kind of landscape all over again, a thing to explore.

A shelf of journals reveals that the larger pieces grow from rich artistic soil. Their pages are part travelogue, part artistic experimentation, and part record of correspondence. One journal shows a deeply impressionistic trip to India, as city skylines, the facades of buildings, and drawings of funeral pyres in Varanasi come to vivid life. The same is true of other trips Newbold has taken. Interspersed among the images are postcards from friends and fellow artists, pointing to a life of friendships and artistic colleagues. To the extent that one can identify with a life lived this way (and this reporter can), Newbold’s art isn’t just a document of her experiences, but a mirror on our own. We may not have Newbold’s skill as a visual artist, but her vivid evocations of her past allow us to revisit our own vivid memories, of food cooked over open fires, of beaches of black sand with long, rolling waves, of a salsa band playing at midnight on a tropical street — and, much closer to home, the New Haven skyline from the top of Sleeping Giant just a few days ago, under a gray early winter sun, the sky clear enough to see all the way to Long Island. Newbold’s art reminds us that our experience of a thing is inextricably bound up with the thing itself, and our interpretation of it that gives it meaning. Perhaps the more aware we are of that, the more true to it we can be.

“Reveries, Journaling in Place” runs at City Gallery, 994 State St., through Jan. 2. For hours and more information, visit the gallery’s website. For information about the book Reveries, visit the artist’s website.