Stephen Hutchings

There is more to Stephen Hutchings’s new paintings than meets their mechanical reproduction. What is lost in the images that illustrate this review, and even in those that are available on the web, is not just the scale, but the workedover surfaces of these seemingly consolidated pictures. The paintings’ intense luminosity picks out single tree leaves and blades of grass even in these illustrations, but much of the elaborate creative process—the scratching, rubbing and overlaying of paint—is apparent only in the actual works. Some of Hutchings’s ironic undercutting of the Romantic idea of nature is lost in reproduction.

In front of the originals that measure up to six-by-six feet, the seamlessness of the skillfully rendered scenes falls apart. The colouring, the overly dramatic lighting and the slightly skewed compositions turn these landscapes into something hyperreal. The images have their origins in digitally manipulated photographs taken by Hutchings. From this high-tech process he proceeds to a low-tech one and traces the image on canvas with the aid of an opaque projector. Then he begins the painting process, starting with charcoal, which he rubs into the canvas to create large solid forms. These are modified with erasers, bringing light into the darkness specks at a time. The drawing is then overlaid with layers of thin, slightly coloured oil glazes. Hutchings’s unique process creates an uncertain surface, where the smoothness is undercut by erased marks, streaks, scratches and smudges. The use of sepia tones and a dark halo around some images (Shoreline bush with marker and far shore) further reminds us that we are not looking at memories of nature, but at memories of an idea of nature.

Hutchings’s paintings come alive with an unresolved tension between the desire for a divine infinity and finite human existence. In the 1990s, irony weighted this tension in favour of the existential finite. Then his series of “Plants, Bushes and Hedges”—flat, dark silhouettes on screen-like backgrounds— emphatically denied the possibility of an immanent spirituality in nature. At the same time, they formed emblems of desire for such fusion. In his recent paintings, the desire for the infinite hangs heavier in the balance than the reality of finite life. Especially in reproduction, the paintings appear to come closer to a straight appropriation of late 19th-century nature imagery, which to Romantics represented the absolute divine. Roads and horizons open up space. Where a bush from 1995 stood out against an empty background, a majestic tree of 2008 is placed near a river that shows both shorelines. Art-historical references to late Romanticism have become more specific: highlighted details in the landscape remind us of Luminist paintings, while the muted colours and play of shadows and light brings back European Pictorialist photography.

Computer technology differentiates Hutchings’ present work from his earlier series and helps him refine the effects that produce Romantic signs for nature: sharp contrasts, highlights, haziness, and dark, brooding colours, as in The distant storm, 2008. Although the technical methods combined with centuries-old oil glazing techniques provide a glimmer of infinity, underneath it all there remains the blackness of burnt wood, the charcoal drawing. He remains the allegorist who keeps the ruin and the promise close together.

Hutchings’s empty landscapes retain a power to unleash existential emotions, as do the aestheticized landscapes of other contemporary painters (April Gornik, James Lahey and Takao Tanabe come to mind). The persistence of popular paintings of unspoiled landscapes in mainstream culture is another indication that a quest to find enchantment continues, a spell that would erase our mortality in the nature that sustains us.

Bronislaw Szerszynski, in Nature, Technology and the Sacred, 2005, has argued that the enchantment of the world does not end in secular modernity, but continues to be transformed in a myriad of cultural practices. Szerszynski works with an understanding of the sacred as a dynamic ordering of nature that, through art and techno-science, allows for an imagined unity of self and other while remaining essentially mysterious.

Hutchings’s paintings do not show a romantic nature infused with spirit, but rather a historical idea of nature that still has the power to invoke a sense, a glimmer, of this infinite spirit. For Hutchings, technology provides ever more sophisticated tools to expand a language of effects that creates this feeling of enchantment. A penetrating light in even the darkest of pictures alludes to that unimaginable place beyond time, against which the fragility of the Earth and the limitations of human endeavours stand in sharp relief. ❚

“Stephen Hutchings” was exhibited at Galerie St-Laurent + Hill in Ottawa from December 5 to December 17, 2008.

Petra Halkes works as an artist, writer and curator in Ottawa. Her book Aspiring to the Landscape: On Painting and the Subject of Nature, 2006, contains a chapter on Stephen Hutchings’s series “Plants, Bushes and Hedges.”