Painting to Save the Planet : Margaret Nielsen turns classic landscapes into metaphors for the clash between modern culture and the natural world.

“It’s impossible to translate the power of nature into an art work, and I’d be a fool to attempt it,” says Margaret Nielsen, whose work is the subject of “Ecstatic Visions and Unnatural Acts,” a mid-career survey at the Santa Monica Museum of Art.

“What I’m trying to do is play with the historical and emotional connotations of landscape--my take on those things has changed significantly over the past 25 years too,” she adds. “My early work transformed landscape into a metaphor for the internal journey we take in life; the more recent work, however, looks at the politics of nature.”

A work from last year, “Mirror,” gives a good indication of Nielsen’s take on ecological politics. In the background is a colorful adaptation of the Frederic Church painting “Twilight in the Wilderness,” which Church painted as a memento mori for the wilderness of 1860. In the foreground, over Church’s landscape, Nielsen has painted a flock of Carolina parakeets, a breed that became extinct at the turn of the century.

“It’s not essential that people pick up on the ecological themes in the work,” she says, “because my hope is that it functions on many other levels as well.”

Though Nielsen knocked off Church for “Mirror,” the landscape master she most frequently borrows from is Albert Bierstadt. “Bierstadt’s work is grander than grand, and is reflective of 18th-Century America’s belief that the wilderness was there to be converted into property,” she says of her fascination with Bierstadt. “Obviously we see nature much differently today, for the simple reason that it’s been completely desecrated. The ghosts, mysteries and spirits have been destroyed by off-road vehicles.”

Nielsen first encountered the mysteries of landscape as a child growing up in Edmonton, Canada, where she was born in 1948. The younger child in a family of two girls, Nielsen has vivid memories of the vast landscapes she saw during family visits to relatives in the country; those immense landscapes, which she says she has no doubt romanticized with the passage of time, were to become the central motif in her art.

A facility for drawing surfaced early for Nielsen, and by the time she was 11 she’d decided she wanted to be an artist. Life changed dramatically for her in 1961, however, when her father, who left a career as a Mountie to become a private detective, moved the family to the San Fernando Valley. “I experienced major culture shock moving from Canada to the Valley,” recalls Nielsen, who currently lives in Eagle Rock.

During her senior year in high school, Nielsen enrolled in a Saturday program for high school students at Chouinard Art Institute, and after graduating from high school, she enrolled there full time. “At the time I was looking at a lot of Pop art, and was also influenced by the work of Vija Celmins, Ed Ruscha and Joe Goode,” recalls Nielsen, who lived in a studio on Temple Street at the time. After relocating to Pasadena in 1970, where she was to spend two years, she moved to downtown L.A. where she lived for 16 years.

“I think my attraction to landscape has a lot to do with the fact that I lived in such a stark, urban environment for so many years,” says Nielsen, who was married to artist George Herms from 1973 until 1977. “My longing for landscape, however, is oddly specific,” she adds. “Although I’ve lived close to it for years, I could never see the Pacific Ocean again and not miss it--it just isn’t part of my emotional makeup to need to be near the ocean. It’s the Eastern Sierra landscape that’s most firmly lodged in my consciousness.”

From 1969 until 1974, Nielsen’s output was largely composed of pen-and-ink drawings with a feminist subtext that explored the theme of man against nature. When she attended CalArts for a year in 1974 to complete the requirements for her bachelor of fine arts, however, her work underwent dramatic shifts. Studying with Jim Starrett (who curated this retrospective), she began making acrylic paintings based on vintage postcards depicting L.A. landmarks. This body of work came to an end in 1980 when she spent a year working on “Love Doesn’t Die; It Suffers a Series of Little Murders,” a group of paintings that explored romantic disillusionment.

The following year her work turned yet another corner. “I decided I wanted to look at the dark side of human consciousness, and at that point water became a central element in the work,” she recalls. “I see water as a symbol of duality and the unconscious--there’s a lot of engulfment in the water paintings too.

“Every painting I make is a portrait of the state of mind I was in at the time I made it, but all my imagery doesn’t come from my unconscious, and that’s why I don’t label myself a Surrealist,” adds Nielsen, who works from photographs, and discards about half her work while it’s still in progress. “But obviously there is an element of Surrealism in my work, and (Rene) Magritte was an important influence when I was younger--I loved the incongruity of his work,” says Nielsen, who’s well-versed in Jungian theory, an important reference point in much surrealism.

In 1980, Nielsen’s interest in psychology led her to enroll at Loyola Marymount University, where she earned a master’s in psychology in 1982. “I became a therapist because it was something that always fascinated me,” says Nielsen, who taught at Otis Parsons Art Institute from 1980 to 1987, at which point she stopped teaching in order to devote more time to her therapeutic practice.

Currently at work on an MTA mural for the Union Gate Project slated to be installed in an office building behind Union Station in September, Nielsen comments that “much of my work has been an exploration of the feminine as it parallels nature. I use specifically feminine archetypes--a cowgirl for instance, who I depict as a male sexual fantasy. In juxtaposing this fantasy with a powerful image of nature I pose the question: What if this woman wasn’t diminished by this cartoon version of female sexuality? What if her real power got unleashed?

“At the moment, birds are the central motif in my work,” says Nielsen, who’s currently at work on a painting of a whooping crane. “I often depict birds entangled with fish hooks, which is intended as a metaphor for nature and culture in collision. Seeing all my work up at once like this, I realize that the nature/culture clash runs through everything I’ve done. Nature and culture can exist harmoniously--many cultures have managed that--but we seem to have a need to conquer it.

“I began working with birds in 1993, and I feel there’s lots more I can do with them, although I have no idea exactly what that will be. But then, if I know how a painting’s going to play out before I’ve begun it, I have no interest in making it. It’s that feeling of being on the edge, of testing yourself and moving into unknown territory that I’m after.”*

Vital Stats

“Margaret Nielsen: Ecstatic Visions and Unnatural Acts”

Address

Santa Monica Museum of Art, 2437 Main St., Santa Monica.

Dates

Wed.-Sun., 11 a.m.-6 p.m.; Fri.-Sat., 11 a.m.-10 p.m. Through March 26.

Phone

(310) 399-0433.