A Simple Plan

Virginia Campbell

Utah artist G. Russell Case paints elemental landscapes that express emotion and grandeur.

FARM AT WHITE CLIFFS, OIL, 14 X 18

Artists who aspire to simplicity in their work have a daunting challenge. The fewer gestures an artist makes, the weightier each one becomes. For landscape artists with a modernist attraction to reducing natural chaos by abstracting the core essence of a scene, the arid architecture of the West’s canyons, mesas, and mountains offers a rich playground. Here, in this stripped-down landscape, so much of the abstraction has already been done. It is a modernist’s dream.

Utah painter G. Russell Case is deeply invested in the mysteries of simplicity, and his native landscape has provided him with an impressive laboratory. “How you go about simplifying is one of the hardest things about painting,” he acknowledges. “It’s like a novel. You have your main character, and then your supporting characters, and after that the more stuff you put in, the more distracting it gets.” In painting, each brush stroke or compositional element signifies a host of conscious and unconscious decisions, and each precludes a host of other possibilities. Drawing just enough of the right detail from the landscape is fraught with enough opportunities to wreck a whole day’s work. “What I like is when I come upon a scene so simple that I actually have to add interest back in,” he laughs. “The point of simplicity is to let the idea come through the landscape.”

There are, of course, many ways of letting the idea come through the landscape. “I’m not so interested in painting technique and color per se, but in spatial relationships,” says Case of his strategy. “Most of what you can say about spatial relationships on a canvas has been said already by great artists. It’s just a matter of going about it in my own way.”

Case’s painting CANYON OF THE COLORADO is a vivid demonstration of the artist’s “own way.” If you had never seen a canyon in real life and looked only at this painting, you would come away with a fair understanding of the essential beauty of this geological formation. Case captures the natural strangeness of it and the intriguing invitation it extends. In the foreground, three Indians on horseback are just entering the canyon, giving a human perspective and scale to this topographical drama. The figures diminish as they descend into geological time, and the shadows encompass them not with darkness but with color. The painting presents a simplified view of what matters about this canyon: bright flatness broken by darker angled depths into which humans venture, moving from superficial acquaintance with the world down into deeper revelations.

The success of this painting relates directly to how unencumbered it is. The colors in the shadows are of overriding interest, occupying over half of the pictorial space. The faded silhouette of the distant horizon quietly frames the upper bound, leaving the viewer’s surrogates, the riders, to orient our visual journey. Here and there a swath of particularly luscious hue stands out to remind us that this adventure has been concocted from paint—a medium as fluid as time itself.

The influence of the early western modernist Maynard Dixon is evident in Case’s work. “Maynard is the most important painter in the West,” Case says bluntly. Though Case was a dedicated painter as early as high school, and was so focused on painting in college that he got through solely by virtue of his art classes (“I scratched by with a D in English,” he admits), he had never seen Dixon’s work until he was out of college. Once he saw it, there was an immediate recognition. “I thought, ‘I know what this guy is doing,’” says Case.

CANYON OF THE COLORADO, OIL, 30 X 40

Part of what distinguishes a painting by Case is its palette. “A lot of people comment on that,” he says, “but it’s just a typical palette. The colors aren’t even that expensive.” Protests notwithstanding, Case’s color language has a distinctive look and feel. It could be that much of what is unique in his palette derives from the many years he spent working in watercolor, a medium unforgiving to false steps in either composition or color.

Case’s father was an illustrator for the Bureau of Indian Affairs who became a watercolor landscape painter and taught his son how to paint at an early age. “In high school I had my own studio in the corner of the basement and professional materials to use,” he recalls. “My father was very encouraging, and he helped with framing my paintings, so that I had a sense of the finished product. When I was as young as 15, he helped me have shows at local banks. I was able to sell my work to buy more materials. I remember I sold a painting to my girlfriend. She insisted on paying 20 bucks she’d earned working at McDonalds.”