Gretna Campbell as Nature’s Keeper
By Harriet Zinnes
It is rare that the eye hovering over the landscapes of the American artist Gretna Campbell, who died in l987 at the age of 65, turns away in shock or dismay. There may not be present a sense of peace (is nature really ever visibly at peace?) but the art suggests that what nature allows the human eye to behold is, if not stridently luxurious in color, always buoyantly colorful. Even her rocks, sometimes covered with white froth, are not without a visual allure and suggestive of an instability in the landscape.
In "Wallpack, Mountain" (1978) her focus on long grass shoots against the vastness of the sky and the snow on the mountain evokes a tension, an imbalance even in the midst of nature’s bounty. One turns to the other eleven works that will be exhibited through July 2 in the Tibor de Nagy Gallery (724 Fifth Avenue, New York City) and knows that the artist never lost her trust in the vibrant, colorful, varied forms and exuberances of nature.
In this exhibition — almost the fortieth for the artist — there are only two works that suggest Campbell’s ability to reveal quite another sense of nature. These works reveal a covert and untraditional acceptance of all natural forms and geometric stances: "Clearing," a work of charcoal on paper of 1974, and "Rocks at the Edge of the Cover," an ink wash on paper of 1952-53, stand almost ghostlike, in a kind of colorless stillness, despite the presence of the artist’s usual trees, fallen tree limbs, gray rock forms. Light and color have been taken away. Their ghostlike enchantment evokes a lurking, bedeviling presence which penetrates and frightens, viscerally.
