Bosman Works Are Full of Water, but Still Come Off Dry

Landscape hasn’t been much more than a sideshow in avant-garde art for what seems like eons--since Postimpressionism, about 100 years ago. But it may be making a comeback. In the way it splits down the middle, “Richard Bosman: Gifts of the Sea” abruptly signals this possibility.

Of the 13 works on view at UC San Diego’s Mandeville Gallery, seven produced from 1980 to 1986 focus on the figure set in a variety of marine contexts. In six works from 1986 to the present, the figure disappears entirely, and only the seascape remains.

The style of these seascapes, which constitute a type of landscape, evades classification. The earlier figurative works, however, clearly reveal this 43-year-old artist’s major debt to neo-expressionism, a European-born style that hit American shores in the late 1970s.

For example, Bosman’s 1980 “Floating Head” employs typically neo-expressionist brushwork and scratchy, nearly sculptural handling of form to produce an image of a frightened blue face vomiting blood and bobbing bodiless in a cold patch of sea.

Another 1980 work, “The Rope,” depicts a terror-filled figure falling into the sea from the rigging of a sailing ship. “Beached,” from 1985, shows a man and a woman heaped together on the shore amid remnants of a shipwreck. (The woman, somehow, still wears her red high-heel shoes, and her lipstick is perfect.)

This group of figure-involving imagery then ends with the 1986 “Studio Scene: Adrift,” in which a painter sprawls face-down, apparently dead, on a flat chunk of Arctic ice, with only brushes, tubes of paint, a palette and a blank canvas for company.

Given the deadly nature of these last images, it’s not so surprising to see Bosman jump ship and end 1986 as a landscape, or rather a seascape, painter. The main thing he seems to carry with him from the maritime miseries he previously painted is a quite adept skill in representing water, in making the plastic qualities of paint tightly equivalent to the look of the frothing, foaming, rolling and tossing of the sea.

There’s undeniable delight in seeing this skill in operation, but it’s not all that unique or inventive. A classic Dutch still life offers similar, although more delicate, experience in which a quick streak of white pigment highlights the rim of a goblet or the shiny skin of a piece of fruit. But this is skill, not art; or certainly not all there is to art.

Proof of this lies in the generally banal impact of the seascapes that emerges from Bosman’s hand beginning in 1986. In all of these, at least two and as many as 10 separate panels are combined in a single frame. “Shoreline,” from 1986, combines three separate scenes of relatively tame waves running up a sandy beach. The multiple panels invoke time and changing conditions; but the reference barely obscures the triteness of the imagery. It’s more like you get three paintings--and three looks at Bosman’s paint--for the price of one.

In the 1987 painting “Beacon,” two panels depict day and night views of a lighthouse isolated on a spit of land. Bosman handles the inherently subtle colors well enough, and his paint here is even more alluring than in previous works. While this indicates that his considerable skill in manipulating paint is continuing to grow, we’re again confronted with post card imagery that seems to be no more than an excuse for Bosman to do his painterly shtick.

In “Awash” (1988), there’s even a hint that the artist recognizes the vulnerability of what he’s doing. The upper panel of the two-part image shows an unmanned skiff facing into the swells of a white-capped sea. The lower panel shows only the skiff’s mast sticking out above waters that are now calm. Whether the wry wit of the story implied by the image is intentional is difficult to determine.

The dubious usefulness of Bosman’s multiple panels reaches its pinnacle in “Sea States,” a 1988 work in which 10 images in two horizontal rows produce an overall work measuring 5 by 15 feet. The individual scenes present a sequence of states of agitation in the open sea, from calm to extremely violent.

The colorations of the water and the sky follow similar variation, from soothing blues and greens to turbid greens, yellows and grays. But while each single panel suggests itself as a study for some eventual masterpiece, locked together they cancel each other out, like mixing hot and cold water.

If the goal of the multiple images is to subdue the emotional responses that any one of the scenes might provoke, that would constitute a rationale of a sort and would be consistent with the exhaustion of emotional reserves expressed in “Studio Series: Adrift,” Bosman’s last figurative work. Nevertheless, for all its technical accomplishment and aqueous imagery, this painting is pretty dry stuff.

As to what Bosman’s work has to say about a possible resurgence of interest in landscape--seascape being a subset of landscape--the message is only the most general one: that something is happening. Bosman has sensed this and picked up on it, just as he seems to have quickly adopted neo-expressionism when it arrived from Europe.

This new interest in landscape may result from something as simple as artists finding that abstraction and figuration are depleted for now, while the domain of landscape has been lying fallow long enough to have become ripe for harvest again. There also may be something more subtle occurring: a reflection of the deepening recognition that the landscape that the industrial revolution started to pollute in a big way around the time of Postimpressionism has now become so abused that it threatens to return the favor and kill us.

Perhaps we’re responding.