ART : Painted Into a Corner : New York artist Mark Innerst won acclaim for his early landscape paintings, but now he’s trying to broaden his creative horizons

“Landscape has a tendency to be heroic and I suppose there is a streak of grandeur in my work, but I think it’s about the eternal more than the heroic,” says New York painter Mark Innerst, whose first Los Angeles exhibition opens Jan. 26 at the Michael Kohn Gallery in Santa Monica.

“There’s a streak of morbidity to the work as well,” he adds, “because when you talk about something eternal, you’re talking about something dead.”

Although he is recognized as one of the leaders of a newly coalescing school of New York landscape painters, Innerst dismisses the label because his subjects aren’t limited to that genre. The 33-year-old artist is a master at creating hauntingly lovely images that invoke a complex emotional response.

Interweaving elements of the sublime and the macabre, his work is freighted with an elegiac quality and speaks of beautiful things irretrievably lost and decaying. And, one of the gravest losses, his pictures suggest, is the experience of quiet introspection and solitude that’s becoming increasingly difficult to achieve in the chaotic jangle of the late 20th Century.

To enter an Innerst painting is to sense time grinding to a halt and silence descending like an enveloping baffle. Gilded scenes--still lifes, portraits, landscapes and cityscapes--executed with a dense, lustrous exactitude worthy of Vermeer, Innerst’s work is steeped in a reverence for history; the idealizing geometry of Precisionism clearly influenced his style, and, like the Hudson River school painters, his work is inflected with a strict Yankee stoicism that allows it to be both voluptuous and chaste.

Although Innerst is evolving away from landscape, his best-loved work continues to be his views of the Northeastern countryside. Narrow ribbons of nature that are almost all sky but for a low horizon line, his pictures present the world in a distant and reduced form, as if glimpsed through a telescope. The implication here is that things look better and are easier to love when viewed from a safe distance--be it the distance of geography, time or memory. The romance of the past is, in fact, a central issue in his work.

“My work is rooted in memory and I suppose I do have a romantic view of the past,” he says. “I wanted to be an archeologist when I was a kid and I’ve always adored antiquities, so I’ve maybe aestheticized the past.”

The allure of the past is fairly easy to understand, and cultures struggling through periods of difficulty often retreat to previously established styles as an escape from the confusion and struggle inherent in the development of the new. Art is presently grappling with a considerable identity crisis, so it’s not surprising that Innerst’s work is being greeted with a sigh of relief in conservative quarters of the art world.

Although New York Times art critic Michael Brenson dismisses Innerst’s work as “coy,” and Art in America critic Lise Holst chastises it for having “the tidy decorativeness of a layout in a graphic design firm brochure,” the response to Innerst’s work has been mostly glowing. “As rigorously thought out as they are beautiful,” says critic Holland Cotter of Innerst’s paintings. Newsweek art writer Cathleen McGuigan describes them as “exquisite and jewel-like,” and Village Voice critic Kim Levin coos over “gorgeously subtle color effects.”

All but two works, ranging in price from $32,000 to $48,000, in Innerst’s October show at New York’s Curt Marcus Gallery sold, and he has placed pieces in several major museum collections (including MOCA’s). This all comes as a bit of a shock to Innerst, who claims to be surprised to find himself a blossoming art star.

“I’ve always had faith in myself as an artist because it comes so naturally to me,” he says, “but I never expected it to become a career--that part does surprise me. I must admit that I do see evidence that I’m ‘successful’ now, but it hasn’t changed my life much.”

That much is apparent on meeting Innerst. Talking with him at his New York gallery, he comes across as the most modest, self-effacing success you could hope to meet. He’s a shy, soft-spoken man with a nervous, fastidious manner, and his personality is marked by a quietly imploding intensity that’s clearly reflected in his work.

Born in York, Pa., Innerst says he had “a classic American upbringing. I was the middle child in a family of three children, and both my parents were raised on farms. So, even though I grew up in a small town, a connection with nature was very much part of my childhood. My father was a milkman when I was growing up and I have fond memories of going along on his route, which was a very lovely rural route.

“I always had an aptitude for drawing and was one of those kids who drew all the time,” he continues. “I decided on a career in art fairly early on--in second grade when they asked who wanted to be an artist, I raised my hand. My parents always encouraged me to pursue it too, and beginning in high school I just poured over all the art books.”

In 1980, Innerst earned a bachelor’s degree in art from Kutztown State College, and later that year moved to a small studio in Manhattan’s East Village.

“I’ve always worked small--this scale certainly wasn’t a strategy I decided on after I moved to New York,” Innerst says. “Throughout my life I’ve tended to find big art bombastic. This isn’t to say there aren’t enormous paintings I adore, but generally speaking, excess seems unsightly to me. I grew up in a house where nothing was ever thrown away and we were frugal in all regards, and I took that aesthetic to the limit and became a complete pack-rat. I love to scavenge, and the idea of making something out of nothing really excites me.”

During his first two years in New York, Innerst worked at the nonprofit, avant-garde artist space the Kitchen, where, he recalls, “I was the janitor, curator’s assistant, installer--I did everything. Working there I was involved night after night with this endless building up and tearing down, this processing of vast amounts of materials. Many of the artists who did pieces there required thousands of dollars to do their work and they seemed so dependent to me. Doing the kind of work I do I felt independent--and to this day, if my paintings didn’t sell I could continue to make them without suffering any financial hardship.”

If working at the Kitchen confirmed Innerst’s suspicion that less is more, his next job, as assistant to Neo-Expressionism’s master of overstatement, Robert Longo, hammered the point home.

“When I worked for Robert I was just out of school so I was excited to be in his world, but working for him only strengthened my resolve that his way wouldn’t be the way I worked,” he recalls. “I worked for Robert in the early ‘80s when there was an intense level of competition in the New York art world, and artists were obsessed with filling big spaces with very powerful work. At Robert’s studio there were always dozens of people running around, elaborate fabrications being produced--it all got to seem too much.”

In 1982 Innerst had his first one-man show at the Kitchen and two years later made his solo debut at a commercial space, the Grace Borgenicht Gallery. At that point Innerst was painting landscapes almost exclusively and was included in several group shows that attempted to define a new landscape sensibility. However, like other artists associated with the genre--April Gornik, Joan Nelson, Dike Blair and David Deutsch--Innerst found this supposed trend a mixed blessing.

“Those landscape-themed shows got to be a bit tired and limiting,” he says, adding “but I’m not complaining because that’s how I got my foot in the door.

Landscape may be how Innerst gained his first notoriety, but his interests have always extended far beyond that. Citing John Frederick Kensett, Martin Johnson Heade and FitzHugh Lane as central influences, he takes the lyricism and classical sense of order of those artists and floats it over darker subtexts.

“I’ve always had a preoccupation with horror,” he confesses, “and around 1984 I had piles of skeletons laying around my studio and was using them in my work. Death seemed like a faraway fantasy at that point, but when it began to move closer and became a reality as the AIDS epidemic picked up steam, I immediately dropped that obvious representation of death in my work. When I look at those pointedly morbid paintings now they strike me as rather naive.”

Whether he’s painting still lifes with skulls or New England seascapes, Innerst’s work looks staunchly traditional at a glance. This is partly attributable to the fact that his style is grounded in a belief in the importance of good drawing, and his painting technique is strictly from the old school. “The paintings are nothing but glaze really,” he explains, “just layers and layers of acrylic varnish, which is like a colored varnish.”

There are, however, flights of fantasy in Innerst’s painterly realism that transform it into something more. The scale of his work is curiously unsettling, and he often paints well-known skylines and eliminates key landmark buildings. Moreover, the way he frames his paintings is highly unorthodox; his frames challenge the paintings for attention and are often so aggressive they threaten to convert the paintings into sculpture. Elaborate constructions that often combine several vintage frames, Innerst’s mannered method of presentation has caused several observers to describe his work as ironic.

“Some of the frames are dry, dark, strict and Calvinist, others are ornate and Victorian, but I rarely intend them to be ironic,” he says. “Occasionally, I make a frame that goes overboard, but that doesn’t happen too often because I don’t want the frames to compete with the images.”

Innerst’s debut show in L.A. is composed of 10 works selected to demonstrate his diversity, so the show doesn’t offer an in-depth look at any of the four themes he is currently exploring; the only discernable bias in the show is in favor of the industrial landscapes that dominated his last New York show.

“I’ve really begun to move away from landscape,” he says, “but one thing that hasn’t changed is that my paintings are never based on a specific view or photograph--they’re a composite recollection of significant configurations that stand out in my mind. And, the separation between what’s real and what’s abstract is growing increasingly blurred.

“The landscapes evolved to the point that they finally became just a blank space with a line across it,” he adds, “and the cityscapes seem to be growing increasingly abstract too. More and more they’re focusing on the layers of the city. Looking at the city, the first thing the eye sees is the layer of trashy commercial buildings, then as the gaze becomes more refined it sees a layer of 40-year-old buildings, then a layer of 80-year-old buildings and so on. I’m really fascinated by the way the skyline grows and how those layers develop. For many people the skyline represents ugliness, power and greed--and those aspects of human nature do play a role in creating it--but I can’t help being impressed by it and see it as a testament to man’s ingenuity. These buildings don’t just appear out of somebody’s check book--there are men out there making them, so it’s a human achievement.”

Now that he has established himself, Innerst can afford to live away from the city, and in 1984 he purchased an abandoned farmhouse in the Pocono Mountains. He is restoring it with a friend who works at the Whitney. A two-hour drive from the Manhattan studio where he continues to work, the farmhouse is where he spends the bulk of his time.

“It’s on four acres of land and was built around the turn of the century,” he says with pride. “It was such a dump when we moved in--I mean literally it was a dump, that’s what they used it for--and I’m getting an enormous sense of satisfaction out of restoring it.”

Even in his choice of living quarters Innerst looks to the past, and takes pleasure in resurrecting something faded and discarded. His work, in fact, might be described as an exercise in reclamation; and, most significant among the things he resurrects is a traditional attitude toward beauty. Much of Modernism has been marked by a suspicion of beauty, a tendency to dismiss it as too easy, a superficial con. Innerst approaches beauty with trust, gratitude, and an unshakable belief in its transcendental powers.

Asked to summarize the emotional texture of his work, he concludes, “I’ve always been enchanted by vaguely tragic themes, and I must admit I do find my work a bit sad. Desire is an important idea for me too, but I feel ambivalent about how direct I should be about it. I don’t want to be too obvious, but I really want the paintings to be wanted and to be seductive. You know, you sometimes hear people complaining about art being too beautiful, but I’ve never found that to be a problem.”