Portraits of Two Artists : Present and Past : April Gornik : The Allure of the Dark Side

“The first time I remember being impressed by a landscape was when I was a child and we visited Lake Erie,” recalls New York landscape painter April Gornik, rummaging through her memory bank for the roots of her sweepingly romantic style.

“I remember looking out at the horizon and experiencing a feeling of fear and unease. Even at an early age, it gave me an intimation of mortality to see all that water and sky, and the paintings I do tap into similar feelings. My work is about the underbelly of the beauty of nature--and the dark side of nature is its indifference. Nature isn’t friendly, nor is it unfriendly--it’s the perfect embodiment of the Other.”

The dark side of nature is a curiously alluring thing. Most of us regard natural disasters and freakish extremes of weather with a queasy fascination, perhaps because we experience a sense of relief at encountering something outside of ourselves that’s absolute and can’t be denied; the ambivalence that colors so much of life is swept away in the face of nature raging at the peak of her powers, and it tickles the part of the human psyche that takes a perverse pleasure in being frightened.

In his landmark essay of 1756, “On the Sublime and the Beautiful,” British writer Edmund Burke explored the link between terror and the sublime, and made the case that fear is an important ingredient in our enjoyment of the sublime (falling in love--a wonderfully terrifying phenomena--is probably the closest most of us get to experiencing this). Said Burke: “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, danger and terror is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.”

Gornik’s work is a perfect illustration of Burke’s theory--her paintings are at once terrifying, exquisite and sexually charged. Freighted with a sense of foreboding, her intensely atmospheric images are suggestive of either the prelude to or the aftermath of an apocalypse. Colossal storm clouds gather in images like “Gyre,” and “Thunder,” while other works shimmer with the eerie calm that settles in the wake of a disaster. Several works in her current show at the Edward Thorp Gallery in New York, for instance, depict a flooded plain where trees appear to sprout from the surface of a tranquil sea, while others--a piece titled “Strange Attractors” in particular--pulsate with a strange sensuality as nature, in a particularly snarling mood, prepares to unleash herself.

“Sex and sensuality play a critical role in the work,” says Gornik, a graceful woman of 36 with a lilting voice and a wild mane of fiery red hair. Talking with her at the gallery prior to the opening that afternoon of her exhibit of new work, she shows not the slightest trace of nerves, and discusses her work with confidence.

“The way light pulsates and the way the Earth curves are very sexual,” she continues, “and for me, that erotic current is central to the power of these images. It’s not something I consciously overlay onto the paintings--it’s just an integrated part of my world view.”

The sexual content of the work is underscored by Gornik’s ability to invest vast space with a peculiar sense of intimacy. There’s never a sign of human presence in her work because she wants the viewer to engage with her images in an absolutely private way. In eliminating the human element and heightening the drama of Earth and sky, Gornik’s paintings take on a hallucinatory edge, and become more about the landscape of the imagination than anything one could locate in the real world.

Landscape is, of course, an age-old genre but it’s never been a particularly celebrated one, and it’s presently dismissed in many quarters as irrelevant to the technological world. Perhaps we in the 20th Century have demoted it to a lesser role because we prefer not to be reminded of our sins against nature. Or, maybe our resistance to the style can be traced to the fact that the epic vistas depicted in much landscape painting (including Gornik’s) are no more real to your average city dweller than a 15th-Century pageant; they depict something we have no firsthand knowledge of, and that’s in the process of disappearing altogether from the face of the Earth.

The fact that nature is presently being shoved towards the graveyard lends a faint perfume of nostalgia to work by Gornik, who’s one of a handful of artists currently reviving a traditional approach to landscape painting. Mark Innerst, Joan Nelson, Dike Blair and David Deutsch, among others, are building enviable careers around landscape painting, and some critics contend that a new school is coalescing. Gornik, however, disagrees.

“We all work very differently and are trying to do different things,” she says. “To refer to us as a school is just a way of boxing us up neatly for art historical purposes.

“Landscape is somewhat in vogue at the moment,” she continues, “but it’s never been terribly popular and when I was in art school I wasn’t taught much about it other than that it was a minor genre subject. Several critics still treat it as a black sheep style.”

Gornik has her own idea as to why that is.

“The art world is much more comfortable with intellectual rather than emotional things, especially right now,” she points out. “That’s frustrating for someone who paints like I do, but I have confidence the current climate won’t last forever. Most people respond to my paintings quite generously, but there have been cases where I think people--a few critics in particular--were actually moved by the work but were disturbed by the feelings it evoked, so they attacked it. Some people find the realm of my work quite uncomfortable. I have one friend who’s always saying things like ‘That’s the scariest painting I’ve ever seen!’ ”

Despite some critical resistance, Gornik is gaining steady ground. She’s been featured in several major museum shows, including the last Whitney Biennial, and the prices for her work are climbing. When she began showing with Edward Thorp in 1981 her paintings went for $3,000; the work in her current show (which sold out) is priced at $35,000-$40,000.

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Gornik has one brother seven years younger, so she essentially led the life of an only child.

“I was rather withdrawn as a child,” she recalls. “I wasn’t a nerd, but I wasn’t too popular either, and I had a highly developed fantasy life that revolved around horses. I had a completely suburban upbringing in lower-middle-class Cleveland--it was a world of discount stores, churches and row houses, each with one tree. There wasn’t a great amount of privacy in that world, and being raised Catholic, it was fairly pressured in that respect too.

“When I first started painting I had an interesting nightmare about Cleveland--I dreamed the houses there were encased in this free-floating cage structure. I guess Cleveland was a confining place for me, even though my parents weren’t too conservative. My mother encouraged me to be creative and my father was this sort of weird bohemian. He worked as an accountant to make money, but he was a jazz musician and was one of the resident eccentrics in our town.”

Following the death of her father when she was 16--an event she describes as “hugely traumatic”--Gornik enrolled in the Cleveland Institute of the Arts, where she remained for two years. In 1973, she transferred for her final year to the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax. The prevailing opinion there was that painting was dead, and Gornik--just 20 at the time--hadn’t yet found her sea legs in art. Her work from that period involved photo collages combined with mysterious captions that she recalls as “extremely confused.”

The staff at Nova Scotia included a young painter named Eric Fischl--27 years old at the time and fresh out of CalArts--and he and Gornik began dating. Now a hugely successful artist, Fischl has kept steady company with Gornik ever since and the pair currently maintain residences in Sag Harbor, N.Y. and lower Manhattan.

After graduating from college in 1974, Gornik took a solo trip to Europe where she spent weeks wandering the museums, immersing herself in the Old Masters. She remembers being particularly struck by the Vermeer landscape, “View of Delft.” “It hadn’t yet occured to me to paint a landscape myself,” she recalls, “but that painting really stopped me. I looked at it as though I were sizing up an opponent.”

In 1976, she returned to Halifax, took a waitressing job, and much to her surprise, did a landscape painting. Though she didn’t really understand her attraction to landscape at that point, she recognized that she’d finally found the proper vehicle for the things she wanted to express.

Gornik’s historical roots are fairly easy to trace. She claims to feel no affinity for the classically serene landscapes of the Hudson River School and the Barbizon painters, nor are the treacly fancies of Edward Hicks to her liking. She leans more towards the hugely ambitious conceits of sturm und drang masters Caspar David Friedrich, Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Edwin Church. A pinch of Arnold Bocklin’s luridly weird “Island of the Dead” comes through in her work as well, as does her admiration for Monet. Her strongest tie, however, is with the Luminist school, a meticulously polished mid-19th-Century American style that centers on the study of light and atmospheric conditions. She’s also fond of Martin Johnson Heade, a minor 19th-Century painter known for his sultry images of South America. Heade was especially good at painting orchids and hummingbirds.

“After I began painting landscape I tried to educate myself in the field, and initially I was quite impressed with Church and Albert Pinkham Ryder--who are polar opposites in many ways,” she says. “Church depicts man as overwhelmed by the grandeur of nature, while Ryder gives a more psychological reading--he projects himself onto the landscape and shows it in his own terms. Ryder’s is the more modern approach and that’s more in line with what I do.”

Oddly enough, Georgia O’Keefe, America’s grand dame of mystical landscape, is only a minor reference for Gornik.

“I really like a few of her paintings, but generally I’m disappointed by her work when I actually see it--the surfaces don’t hold together so well,” she says. “She has, of course, touched a hugely responsive chord in people, probably because she developed a style of abstraction that’s extremely accessible. People can recognize what the stuff is about.”

Gornik’s work has often been described as surreal, and though she agrees “there’s certainly a surreal element to the work,” she contends that “it’s not the kind of studied Surrealism designed to raise eyebrows. It’s much more subtle than pure Surrealism.”

One thing she does share with the Surrealists is her use of dreams as a primary creative source.

“I’ve dreamed landscapes for years and my dreams play an enormous role in my work,” she says. “In fact, when I first started doing landscapes I felt insecure about painting in this style and the dreams were like positive omens for me, and I’ve done a few paintings that were exact replicas of images that came to me in dreams. This isn’t to imply that I feel like a channel when I paint--it’s more an indication of how completely the subject pervades my consciousness.”

Mingling with her dreams are pictures from the real world, most of them photographic images she shoots herself.

“I’ve done paintings entirely based on an image in my mind’s eye, but I usually work from photographs I’ve taken,” she explains. “I don’t go on photo expeditions in search of magical landscapes, but I usually have a camera with me in case I see something amazing. I’ve done paintings inspired by a tiny snippet of a photograph--one small detail will suggest a whole situation around it--and there have been a few times when I’ve painted a photograph almost exactly as is. However, I usually have to manipulate them a lot to draw out what I want.”

Asked how she sees the work evolving, she says “it seems to be growing increasingly emotional and dense, and it’s less awkward than it used to be. I used to be absolutely conscious of everything I did in my work but over the years I’ve learned to trust myself and now I work in a more intuitive way. Thematically, however, it hasn’t really changed--it’s still a deeply personal psychological response to the world around me.”

Gornik conducts her psychological poking and prodding in rather idyllic surroundings. She and Fischl have a studio in Lower Manhattan that’s been in the process of renovation for several months, so she’s spent the better part of the past year at their country home in Sag Harbor, N.Y. She spends from 5 to 10 weeks on each painting, and says her concentration is only good for about 5 hours a day. She paints in the afternoon--”I tend to be a bit fuzzy in the morning,” she laughs--and listens to opera while she works.

A good chunk of her leisure time is spent with books. An avid reader, she’s done several paintings inspired by literary works, among them Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow,” E. M. Forster’s “Passage to India,” and D. M. Thomas’ “The White Hotel.” Other leisure activities include gardening (Gornik’s lovingly tended garden is featured in a soon-to-be-published book on artists’s gardens), tennis and dinners with the leading lights of the art world. She and Fischl seem to know everyone, and she bounces ideas about her work off of various distinguished friends. Her most important art dialogue, however, is with Fischl.

“Eric and I are always talking about art and we’ve definitely affected each others work, especially early on,” she comments. “When we first started going together, I was doing conceptual work and Eric was doing very flat figurative paintings. Then I had this landscape revelation and started making images involving deep space and he started incorporating space into his work as well. There’s been a nice interchange between us, but there’s been a lot of tension and jealousy as well, particularly when we first moved to New York. That was a very hard period for us.”

While Fischl’s career took off like a skyrocket in the early ‘80s, it’s taken Gornik nearly a decade longer to carve out a comparable niche for herself. While detractors might say her work simply didn’t merit the attention, there’s no denying that the art world is traditionally biased in favor of men.

“This is still a very sexist culture we live in,” Gornik says, “and in trying to establish a career as an artist it’s been a big disadvantage being a woman. I also think women are taken less seriously when they’re attractive. I don’t think there’s anything distinctly feminine about my paintings, nor do I want to be thought of as a ‘woman artist.’ That really grates on me. Emotionally I’ve dealt with this issue and I feel good about the work and my career, but I don’t have any illusions about the egalitarianism of the art world.”

In discussing the patronizing treatment women are subjected to in the art world, she recalls the time that a man approached her at one of her openings to explain the scientific inaccuracies in her paintings.

“I told him I knew the paintings weren’t scientifically correct, and that wasn’t important to me,” she says, laughing at the memory. “These are not faithful renderings--they’re exaggerated interpretations of my response to a given landscape. Some details are intensified while others are subdued or completely submerged. You’re seeing the landscape I want to see rather than the one that’s actually there.

“The paintings are like Rorschach tests,” she adds, “and they don’t have the same meaning for everyone because they’re ambiguous. For instance, there are no people in my paintings so the scale is unclear. People have completely different interpretations of the scale of my paintings, and how big or small you feel in relation to the image tells you something about yourself.”

While Gornik’s paintings are ultimately maps of interior landscapes, the physical world remains the spark that ignites the flame.

“I love imminent storms--the charge of the air is incredibly exciting just before a storm erupts,” she enthuses. “I also love clear, brilliantly sunny days, which simultaneously depress and exhilarate me. I can remember sitting in the back yard on a perfect, hot July day when I was a kid. The air was perfumed with flowers and the sky was intensely blue, and I remember feeling unbearably sad that this exquisite moment couldn’t last. I also remember watching for tornadoes as a little girl, but we never got any--we lived on the west side of town and they always blew in from the east. I always wanted to see one.”