When John Sabraw moved from Saint Louis to the “strange micro subtropical zone” of Athens, Ohio, a year ago he discovered the intriguing changes fog can produce: “Every other morning you wake up and the landscape is re-created for you,” he says. Though his previous work included trompe l’oeil paintings of “cast-off implements, rusty tools, and old medical photographs,” for his new small pieces at Thomas McCormick he began depicting outdoor scenes in morning mist.
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Sabraw’s objects float almost weightlessly. The low blue fog that hugs the ground in Eventually makes the trees that rise from it seem like dream objects, and a country lane disappears into the background. The road in One Turn is very low in the composition, and its neutral blue-cream color connects it with the foggy sky, so that rather than providing an anchor it seems to drift upward. The trees in Next are almost overwhelmed by hazy light, but at the bottom edge is a line of precisely painted blades of grass. Not surprisingly, Sabraw is influenced by the Hudson River School landscape painters but also by 17th-century Dutch still life painter Pieter Claesz, a primary source for his earlier work. The grass curtain conveys an objectivity, a reluctance to completely abandon the solidity of things, that gives his fog even more mystery by contrast.
The principal influence on Arthur Marks’s untitled photographs at I Space is the great American landscape photographer Robert Adams, whose work Marks first saw in 2002, a year after he graduated from art school. Avoiding the self-contained compositions of Ansel Adams and many lesser photographers, Robert Adams creates images that seem partial views of a landscape and that record the human impact on the land over time. Marks continues this tradition with pictures taken mostly from trains. As a student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Marks discovered “a real emotional empathy for landscape”; he also traveled on Amtrak a lot. Starting to notice small variations in the flat terrain outside town, he began to realize how little of the land was untouched–even a cornfield with no fences or buildings in sight was still a human creation.
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