Trees take a twist toward abstraction

Photo courtesy of the artist, James Kandt. Oil on canvas. Untitled Landshape No. 9. 

 Pity the expatriate of nature who has never stretched out under a tree, head butted up against its trunk, and looked up. Nothing puts the smallness of human troubles into perspective as quickly as lying down at the foot of a behemoth with its colossal limbs stretched to the corners of the sky. This is grace. Bestowed by Mother Nature.

 Play it forward. Artist James Kandt has captured that very feeling of willingly surrendering supine to nature in his current work, “Landshape Series,” shown by Trish Higgins Fine Art in Wichita, Kan. After a bout with abstract, non-representational painting, it seems Kandt himself has surrendered recumbent to nature. And as the artist succumbs to the trees, so does the viewer. The large canvases, up to 6 by 4 feet, have the power to transport us away from our urban landscapes and horizon lines. Kandt’s “Landshape Series” delivers peace through a slightly off-kilter natural world.

Don’t look up these trees for traditional landscapes or bucolic nature studies. There’s nothing to lull the viewer into discounting or ignoring the imagery as simply trees. The organic orientation and new perspective of these paintings have pushed Kandt’s compositions toward abstract and pushes the viewer to rethink nature.

“I find myself returning to a more natural arena, of painting recognizable images in an abstract arrangement of elements,” Kandt says. “I like to refer to these images as abstract realism.”

But it’s more than composition and perspective that push the paintings toward abstract realism. Kandt plays with pattern in the textures found in nature. In “Untitled Landshape No. 7,” the texture of the bark on a twisting branch replicates the shapes of the fall leaves on the tree. The leaves seem to all be blowing in the same direction as the deeply rutted bark is growing. They move in unison.

Kandt has an ability to push past realism with more than tree textures. He handles the ripples on water in “Untitled Landshape No. 15” with the same dexterity toward abstraction. The play of light and reflections on water are transformed from real to surreal as the viewer studies the canvas.

Kandt’s color palette is another well-employed device in his abstract realism tool belt. In “Untitled Landshape No. 12,” the peeling black and grey bark of a sycamore tree reveals the buttery yellowness of the trunk below. Blacks, greys and yellow all sing against the Prussian blue sky.

In Kandt’s most successful piece in the show, “Untitled Landshape No. 9,” light, too is added as an element in this ethereal realism gone mad to the point of becoming abstract. Looking up through the trees, behind a dark trunk and its branches, a yellow arcing branch that glows with sunlight runs parallel to the trunk while intersecting the dark branch. Both the dark somber tones of the closer timber and the warm yellows of the further branches play beautifully against the blues of the sky. Leaves dance in patterns at the composition’s edges. Light, color, texture, pattern, perspective and composition work perfectly in this piece to accomplish the artist’s stated goal of moving viewers from their preconceived ideas and introducing them to a comfortable, but undiscovered moment in nature.