ART REVIEW : 2 PAINTERS A JOY WITH LANDSCAPES

Landscape continues as a viable and even urgently felt inspiration for contemporary artists, as evinced in painting exhibits by Anne Moore and Miriam Smith at Paris Green Gallery in La Jolla (7825 Fay Ave.).

Despite their common subject, the works are radically different in composition, palette and feeling. Neither artist offers a conventionally realistic representation of scenes from nature, yet viewers are sure to respond with, “Yes, that’s the way it is.”

This is the first significant show for Anne Moore, whose works have been included in numerous group exhibits but not in a solo show until now. Despite (or maybe because of) a relative absence of substantial critical commentary over a period of years, her works are surprisingly mature. The color sense is sophisticated and pleasing. The control of the brush is energetic and sure. The compositions are complex but just. The crowded imagery enhances a sense of depth without, however, inhibiting a sense of expansiveness. There is nothing timid or hesitant in these works, but there is also no sense of a lack of control in these brushed, impastoed and scratched surfaces.

Human, not monumental in scale, Moore’s paintings create a feeling of compatibility with nature. They require examination from both a distance and up close, from straight on and from oblique angles.

While it is rarely possible for the viewer to define specific landscape features, as in the “Jungfrau” series of pastel drawings with their suggestions of mountain peaks and rocky outcroppings, there is a synesthetic presence of scents, textures and sounds, most acutely in the dark painting entitled “I Touch the Earth.”

This is a show that you want to spend a lot of time with. It resonates with a pantheistic peace.

Miriam Smith’s paintings, like Moore’s, represent nature generalized rather than particularized. Trees and densely layered foliage are identifiable, however.

Her palette is reductive rather than full--shades of black and white with rare strokes of pallid (but effective) blue and red.

Her surfaces are aggressively agitated, evincing a sense of the whole body involved in the laying of marks during the creative performance. Sturm und Drang is here, and exhilarating high drama, rather than harmony.

But Smith is capable of conveying a different kind of perception of nature as well. Her small pastel drawings are profoundly moving in a very different way, reminiscent of the works of Morris Graves in their mystical apprehension of nature through its physicality.

The demanding work of this artist, who has already gathered critical acclaim, is a bracing contrast with Moore’s.

These complementary exhibits continue through Feb. 28.