Artist Heads Southwest

On one side of the gallery, the shapes are recognizable as landscape, and desert landscape at that. The rocks are rusty colors, the sun brightening them where the light touches them. The sky is a bright blue. On the other side of the gallery, the shapes are simpler, more abstract, the colors more varied. Following the paintings from left to right across the gallery, you can trace where the artist, Judy Atlas, began — and where she ended up — in City Gallery’s latest exhibit, ​“The Landscape Real and Imagined,” running now through Sept. 27.

The spark for the paintings was a trip to the Southwest Atlas made with her husband in September 2019. They visited the national parks there, among them the Grand Canyon and Bryce Canyon, and the landscape ​“just knocked my socks off,” Atlas said. ​“It was like being on another planet.” Returning home, she said, ​“I couldn’t get these gorgeous sights out of my mind and thought I’d paint a few.”

She was slated to have a show of her paintings at City Gallery in May. The pandemic intervened. In response, Atlas returned to the studio. Painting further and expanding the series, it turned out, was ​“a wonderful respite” from current events, she said. ​“Some people work through their angst. I prefer to escape from it.”

What began as a series of studies of the Southwestern landscape, pulled from her photos of the trip (“you cannot take a bad photo” in the parks, she said), developed into using further abstraction to capture some of the feeling of being there — and then seeing just how far that abstraction could go.

“I had a lot of fun,” Atlas said. ​“I didn’t struggle with them. There was no questioning myself. These just came out, and I’m happy with them.”

Part of the idea behind painting abstractly is, in a sense, to lean into the medium of painting itself. When painting, Atlas said, ​“you immediately abstract — you can never get what you can in a photograph,” even if the painter is going for photorealism. To paint is to interpret — and to make decisions about how to render an image. ​“You have to make something pleasing,” Atlas said. ​“You have to make it work.”

For this series of paintings, the source offered much in inspiration. ​“I was so excited about the light and colors — the sky was so blue,” Atlas said. ​“To wake up and see one breathtaking sight after another — how lucky were we?” And ​“God knows when we’ll be able to take a trip like that again.”

The first set of abstractions involved exaggerating shadows and lines, to emphasize the staggering senses of space and scale she experienced as a visitor to the Southwest. She also experimented with the size of the painting; her rendering of the Grand Canyon was on the largest canvas she wanted to work on, to get at the ​“the feeling of size and space.”

But she took a closer look, too, at the way the rocks around her were worn by the elements, exposing layers beneath. She used that natural phenomenon as inspiration to layer paint in the same way.

“I’d been playing the idea of pushing the paint with something other than a brush,” Atlas said. She settled on a scraper-like tool that created a thin, highly varied layer of paint that allowed her to still see the layers beneath. The colors were suggested by the Southwestern colors of land, sky, and water. There was also an unpredictable element to using the tool that Atlas welcomed. ​“It’s just wonderful to find what happens,” she said. ​“There’s so many ways to disturb and add paint — it’s endless.”

In other places in the Southwest, ​“I felt I was looking at life in the 1200s,” Atlas said, as she saw rock formations that resembled distant castles. That idea was abstracted into spiky, triangular forms that she continued to push.

From there, Atlas said, she proceeded into artistic territory she described as ​“what if?” What if she introduced colors she didn’t see in the Southwest? What if she abstracted the shapes even further? ​“How I can I make it different, but the same?” she asked herself. The show ends with Somewhere, which Atlas described as a ​“salute to the landscape.” In it, she went for reducing the shapes in those Southwestern landscapes to their simplest forms and still convey the sense of space she encountered when she visited there last year. The forms in the painting ended up being a long way from the forms in the land itself. But ​“the colors are still the same,” she said.

City Gallery is located at 994 State Street. The gallery is open Saturday and Sunday from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. or by appointment (call 203 – 782-2489 or email info@city-gallery.org). Judy Atlas will be in the gallery on Sept. 26. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the numbers of people in the gallery at once will be kept low. Masks must be worn at all times and social distance must be adhered to.