Maybe a year ago, word on the street said there was to be an upcoming exhibit at the MFA Boston showcasing Winslow Homer’s watercolor oeuvre. Well, the day came, and we made the sojourn on opening day to see “Of Light And Air,” claimed to display one of the “largest collections in the world” in a delicately-lit, intimate setting. And when they say large, they mean it. It took us over two hours to rifle through the expansive documentary of Homer’s environment and people working within it. He is an extraordinary painter of exactly the ordinary.
The exhibit is remarkable in more ways than its breadth. It is expansive, yes, but more importantly, some of these pieces have been stored out of view for a generation or more. It’s exciting – rather monumental – to access them so closely. In a world where often artwork is barred from the public, this exhibit allows the viewer to get close enough to see not only the most intimate of marks, but also the confidence of the artist with his material.
To discuss Homer, one must understand the context of his time. The social temperature of the nineteenth century responded swiftly to technological advances of the Industrial Revolution – an early back-to-the-land movement before the land had been fully privatized. The zeitgeist centered around keeping land human, and Homer was no exception. For example, we can place Homer (1836-1910) in fair company with John Muir (1838-1914), Walt Whitman (1819-1892), Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) and even Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919). Each of these men engaged—in his own way—with themes of nature, spirit, and civic life, forming a distinctly American vision.
Homer’s achievement is expressly human; he observes and records the enterprises of work and pleasure, movement and rest, anxiety and ease. Without reservation, he is much more than a painter: he is the painter of people living with and stewarding the environment: gatherers, fishermen, woodsmen, hunters and their four-legged assistants; Homer explores what the world has to offer the common man whose boundaries of work and leisure overlap. An avid fisherman, much of Homer’s work is tied to living near and within water: seascapes, rivers, ponds, fishing, collecting seaweeds, basketry, gender-divided labor, rural and urbane living.
The overwhelming share of this exhibit comprises water-based media on paper, though it is not exclusive to watercolor. Homer made use of liquid charcoal and chalk, gouache, ink, and, in at least one case, ground anthracite (heating coal) into a loose paste. The man was an uncompromising force of experimentation and this exhibit is his repository. Homer painted prolifically, yes, but he also scraped, tore, rubbed, blotted, dabbed, drew, and used an array of unusual materials that parallel the experimental nature of contemporary art and artists. There’s a lot to learn from Homer, but most importantly, from him we can learn to paint (and by extension: live) fearlessly.
Case in point, we have a medium-sized painting simply titled, The Adirondack Guide (1894). Here a man is alone in a boat, mid-stroke, in calm, almost-glassy water. The colors are luminous. The man is looking back: is he guiding me? I look past him to swampy tree stumps cooled by distance; to the sides: wetland bushes and branches, heavy in shade painted loosely and in cool jewel tones. My guide, Rufus Wallace, warm and inviting, waits patiently for me to “catch up” to him. His pale shirt and suspenders cast cool shadows to the left. His slope hat catches a watery reflection and shades his neck and upper back. The sun is medium high and ahead of him. It is either mid-morning or mid-afternoon. For Wallace, though, time seems irrelevant: he only “hears America singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs,” and asks me to listen.
In Girl, Seated (1880) Homer made strategic use of charcoal and white watercolor on toned paper to cast a sense of longing. The contrasts of this piece really caught me: First those billowing white clouds make the scene feel warm and summery, yet the girl seems pensive. She looks leftward, chin in hand and elbow propped by leg, but her body is essentially forward: for what is she waiting? The deep, rugged marks of grass in the foreground and a bold, white signature. Her shoes, sketched with precision. What magic is this?
While his media technique is exquisite, this piece stood out to me for the social commentary on the “empty” middle ground between black and white. In his time, could there even be a middle ground? The girl is seated on what appears to be a log in front of perfectly billowing white clouds. She looks to the past (to the left). She seems like she’s waiting for something, but what? Liberation? Equality? A lover? The clouds behind read like cotton. Is she contemplating the expansive gap of production vs. consumption? Or is she considering her future as a suffragette and freedom fighter? Or is she simply a girl on a log?
Lastly, Homer left no media absolved of its potential. In Women on the Sands, (Mussel Gatherers) Homer used chalk, liquid charcoal and crushed anthracite on toned paper. Of all the paintings in the exhibition, this one stuck with me the most. The skilled use of white (again) that traces the landforms and suggests the sky above and in reflection (outside the view of the work). At first glance, the composition reads as a landscape, but upon inspection one can see the recessed forms as other groups of women. Clusters of women work, but the intimacy of work is shared in conversation. The two women in the forefront appear to be finished and leaving, but maybe catching a few words along the way. By contrast to Girl, Seated, this work is duskier, muckier, fantastically wetter. The sky is reflected in the low tides, exposing rocky barriers where heavy bags cause the women to stoop just to catch the center of gravity.
While this work could be considered a preliminary sketch for a more-detailed studio piece, it is exactly these qualities that drew me to it. I absolutely loved the naturalism of it. Women reflecting the landscape so sincerely that they become it.
Overall, this exhibition was an absolute feast. There are many more works worth discussing—particularly those from Homer’s tropical period, which reveal a different light, palette, and rhythm, but we have no time for that today. The exhibition closes on January 19. If you are in the Greater Boston area and have not yet visited, I wholeheartedly recommend that you do. It is a rare opportunity to encounter both the intimacy of Homer’s process and the breadth of his vision in one place.
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