George Wexler's Marvelous Places: The Artist & His Landscape

George Wexler, born in Brooklyn in 1925, knew that he would be an artist from an early age. Much to his sister Selma's chagrin, since they shared a bedroom in the family's apartment, he filled every square inch of wall space with sketches and paintings, the room stinking of turpentine – the thinner of choice for oil paints. Immersed in the pursuit of art, he started with the social realism prevalent at the time. Wexler was later hired by Michigan State University to teach commercial art but in his own studio began to paint in the abstract, influenced by cubists such as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, as well as the drip paintings of Jackson Pollack. Before long, though, he found himself painting mountains in the abstract from imagination. Realizing that deep down he had an affection for the landscape art genre, Wexler decided to return to New York where he became a faculty member at the State University of New York – New Paltz. There, he experimented with abstract expressionist landscapes while gradually internalizing the mystique of the countryside – the mountains and valleys, rivers and roadways and the long, sensual stretches of farmland. He began to feel a fellowship with the once maligned 19th century Hudson River School artists such as Thomas Cole, Frederick Church, and Asher B. Durand. But rather than emulate their style, he gradually, over many years, developed his highly individualized, sophisticated realist aesthetic that was both inspired by the past and unquestionably influenced by the spirit of modern times.This book is not only a representation of George Wexler's landscape oils, but a portrait and vision of a countryside that in its most finely rendered state is so beautiful in can bring our souls to tears. The raison d'etre of an artist, in Wexler's view, is to express oneself, and over time his technique evolved not as romantic and flamboyant tours-de-force of a Thomas Cole or Albert Bierstadt, but rather personal exegeses of a scripture written in oil and pigment, an interpretation of the fundamental nature of the country landscape. In this vein, Wexler's ubiquitous farms and roads do not intrude into his compositions so much as emphasize that Man finds his true self in the context of the natural world. One cannot possibly view these paintings as photographic renditions since they bear so little resemblance to the world we see with our eyes. These are, in a sense, psychic landscapes that sometimes veer into the surreal. The so-called "leaf-by-leaf" realism of his later work was only a means to capture one's attention, a red herring to encourage people to look beneath the surface. An epiphany of the true nature of Wexler's most finely wrought paintings therefore requires a long meditation on what lies beneath – the mysticism of a pastoral countryside, with its myriad of elements, that goes far beyond mimesis to reveal itself through an exquisite balance of color, composition, and poetry. Read more