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MILES BAIR: TEMPORAL PLANES
AUGUST 13 – OCTOBER 16, 2004
Opening reception, Friday, August 13, 5pm to 7pm
Cascades and Arrangements: A Poetry Reading with IWU Poet Michael Theune, Tuesday, September 28, 7pm
Generously sponsored by Country Acres Land Corp. and Carol & Jim O’Donnell
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It was with awe
That I beheld Fresh leaves, green leaves, Bright in the sun. Basho (Japanese 1644-1694) Translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa, from Basho, The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches, 1966
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Like haiku, Miles Bair’s paintings employ a deceptively simple structure to capture the ethereal beauty of natural spaces and convey complex feelings of wonder and solitude.
Combining his commitment to art-making with an intense interest in Japanese art and culture, Miles Bair explores all that the painting medium allows. In his paintings from 2002 to present, Bair first applies two to three coats of black gesso to the stretched canvas, then uses white chalk to trace compositions derived from photographs, memory, and invention. Using his dot-pattern technique, his landscapes emerge from a structured, yet abstract, application of paint. Bair heightens and resolves the color by layering glazes in the same manner. Further Bair inserts Japanese-influenced areas of gilded gold and silver, lending an architectural and decorative sensibility to the paintings.
Like scenes in a Japanese folding screen, the scale in Bair’s paintings is often ambiguous. The eye scans the entire painted surface encountering trees and rocks, leaves and water, and occasionally birds and fish. As the eye journeys, so does the mind. The sadness of autumn leaves floating down a stream prompts reflection on the transience of human life.
These iconic landscape paintings reflect the artist’s association with specific places: Bair grew up in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, lives in a wooded area of central Illinois, spends quality time in the north woods of Wisconsin, and travels often to Japan to conduct research. Yet with ease and inventiveness, Bair’s compositions range from the real to the imagined. The trees may or may not be identifiable. The leaves stylized in a border may or may not relate to the trees depicted in the landscape portion of the painting; they may actually be tracings of leaves from Bair’s yard or a direct reference to a Japanese screen painting. Bair’s artistry is being true to what each individual painting requires.
The stylistic and formal techniques used in the paintings allow Bair liberal expression. He respectfully pays homage to Japanese aesthetics to investigate the temporal coexistence of nature and culture. The poetic and quiet beauty of his paintings fittingly corresponds to poems written with apparent simplicity and oriental balance by Robert Bly.
The strong leaves of the box-elder tree,
Plunging in the wind, call us to disappear
Into the wilds of the universe,
Where we shall sit at the foot of a plant,
And live forever, like the dust.
Robert Bly (American, 1926- )
Poem in Three Parts, III, from Silence in the Snowy Fields, 1962
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