George Wexler

Hudson Valley Magazine
April 1975
Art Focus
by Tom Enger

Many an amateur gallery visitor has had the experience of looking at an interesting abstract of a circus clown only to discover that the painting was of a “Banana Tree.” It’s things like that which send so many people wandering out of galleries muttering, “I guess I just don’t understand art.” Then they buy the first abstract painting they see, hang it on their wall, and pretend to their friends that they understand it perfectly.

It was refreshing to find a New Paltz couple who both turned away from abstract painting in favor of realism. George Wexler paints landscapes, mostly of the Hudson Valley. In fact, the Mohonk Tower just west of New Paltz seems to appear in his paintings with unusual frequency. His wife, Thyra Davison, is a sculptor. Her bronze castings of seashells and fruit come as a bit of a surprise. “I started around 1961,”she told us. “nobody was doing realism then – let alone still life.”

According to Thyra, “We’re from the pre-college generation. We both went to professional art schools.” She studied at the National Academy and at the Brooklyn Museum Art School. George studied at Cooper Union. Both came out as abstract painters.

George, who teaches in the Art Department at New Paltz State College, gradually gave up abstractions in favor of realism. His large panoramic views of area landscapes are carried by a pleasant understatement of color. With his attention to detail, some come close to being large photographs. “No,” George corrected us, “Photorealism, that’s another school altogether.”

He is, for example, willing to take liberties in interpreting a scene. George pointed to a large painting which included a painter at his easel. “I sketched him in his home and added him as I worked on this painting.” Unfortunately, he sketched the artist facing the wrong direction, so reversed him in the painting. “He doesn’t really paint left-handed,” he explained.

Three of George Wexler’s paintings hang in the Legislature in Albany. They’re among the first things you see as you enter the building.

When Thyra made her change from abstract to realism, she kept trying to get more depth into her work. Trapped by the two-dimensionality of drawings, she turned to sculpture.

Several of her sketches hang in their home and most of these correspond to sculpture that she has done. Most of her work is life-size, including busts of several family members and a number of typical still life subjects. (It’s just not that often that you find sculpture of a pear reclining on folds of cloth.)

When we visited, Thyra was working on a full-length standing figure. A brace kept the wax from sagging while she worked on it. When finished, it will be sent out to be cast.

Recently, she’s been doing several small bas-relief pieces derived from pictures out of the family photo album. When these are cast in bronze, they’ll make an interesting way of displaying the old pictures.

Most of Thyra Davidson’s work is shown at the First Street Gallery, the Albany Institute, and Provincetown. She is currently preparing for a one-woman show in the fall at the First Street Gallery in SoHo, New York City.

Every week, Thyra travels to New York to teach a sculpture class at Brooklyn College. She says she gt the job because she was “just about the only realist sculptor around.”

If you get a chance to see the work of George Wexler and Thyra Davidson, go. It’s pleasant to be able to look at a painting or sculpture and be able to ask, “Where is that?” or “Who is that?” instead of “What is that?”

Arts Magazine
Jan 1976

George Wexler seems to have a botanist’s interest in green plants, especially trees. The vegetation in his Hudson Valley paintings and drawings is so carefully rendered that a trained eye would probably be able to identify the varieties without difficulty. He is able, with a wide range of green tones, to skillfully depict the elusive shadows in a stand of trees. Aptly enough, the absence of vigorous growth – in the autumn after the leaves have fallen – is nicely handled. Wexler is quite good, for example, at painting bare branches, and he seems comfortable with rocks and water. Wexler’s drawings in pencil reveal a much surer hand and attitude. Ironically, the conversion of one of his paintings to a one-color printing for his announcement appears much more evocative of the vigor of nature than the painting it was taken from.

American Artist Magazine
May 1981
by Eunice Agar

George Wexler: Hudson Valley Painter

The cliffs of the Shawangunk Mountains west of the Wallkill River in New Paltz, New York, rise above the home of George Wexler, painter, and his wife, the sculptress Thyra Davidson. Ten years ago the Wexlers built their home and studios in this wooded area of the Hudson River Valley at the end of a dirt road that winds among fields, ponds, and woods. The large windows of their home open above a pond filled with edible fish. A herd of deer live nearby. Sections of the woodland that had to be cleared to build their home have been left to nature’s care. Grass has grown around the house without any seeding or formal lawnmaking. Small plants, bushes, and, more recently, pine trees have reappeared. Wexler has cut a road through the woods so that he can harvest the acres of cordwood, left from a lumbering operation in the hills, and supply wood to heat his home.

Wexler’s total immersion in daily, minute changes in the natural world, combined with the sense of vast space he acquires on painting trips along the Hudson Valley and in the catskills, has had a profound effect on his painting. Gradually, over a period of 30 years, his work has evolved from abstraction through an expressionistic response to nature to his present, intricately detailed, panoramic views. Some critics have described him as a neo-Hudson River painter. He has indeed carefully studied the work of Thomas cole, Asher B. Durand, Frederic Church, and other members of the Hudson River School. On recent painting trips, he has systematically sought out the exact sites at which they worked. North Lake and South Lake, the ruins of the Catskill Mountain House where Cole and Durand stayed, and the famous Artists’ Rock are all still in untouched wilderness – part of the Catskill State Park. Last summer, Wexler also worked on the opposite (east) side of the river from a fruit orchard that slopes toward the Rip Van Winkle Bridge south of Hudson, New York. The site is not far from Olana, the home of Frederic Church, which overlooks the Hudson River from the hills above the bridge.

Wexler says the only change in the terrain is the trees. Originally the Catskill Mountains were covered with hemlocks, the bark of which was used in the 19th century for tanneries in the region. Logs were also floated downriver to New York. Different varieties of trees have since covered the mountains. Increasingly, Wexler finds himself wanting to depict not just the general impression of masses of foliage, but also the clearly identifiable forms of specific trees, bushes, and plants. His mastery lies in his ability to integrate a richly detailed surface with a sense of vast space and light. His feeling for specificity extends to the region itself. Wexler finds it difficult to work in strange locales. For him, choosing to paint in the mountains of New Hampshire represented a major change. But he wanted a fall painting in time for an exhibition, so he went to New Hampshire for the early colors. He has since done other views there as well. He describes a trip to Florida, during which he had planned to paint, then started and destroyed two canvases, and finally went fishing.

Recently, Wexler had an opportunity to compare his paintings first-hand with classic Hudson River work when he showed them to a gallery that specializes in that period. He discovered that, despite identical subject matter and a similar practice of working from nature, his work is totally different. His paint is more opaque than that of the Hudson River artists, colors and materials vary, and the whole spirit of his work contrasts with the very different flavor of these 19th-century artworks.

Wexler does virtually all his painting from nature, returning many times to the same site to complete a work. A painting measuring 26” x 33” will take approximately 18 sessions of four hours each. Since he has been working so extensively outdoors, he has tended to do smaller paintings than in the past. Sometimes he does two or three from each location – a morning painting, an afternoon painting, and one for cloudy days. Recently, he has been doing many paintings from high vantage points looking across a valley toward mountains. These often have a low horizon line and large expanses of sky. He points out that light conditions are easy to work with from heights. He can spend six to eight hours a session, working through the middle of the day, because the summer light and light on gray days are evenly dispersed all day over land seen from above. There is not the dramatic shift of light and shade that occurs with subjects close at hand, necessitating different paintings in the morning and the afternoon.

The one exception to Wexler’s on-the-site method is a very large landscape which, for the first time, he is doing in the studio from drawings and memory – mainly because of the size. He is not using slides or photographs, because he finds they do not have the right kind of information, the kind that he searches out through his own drawing.

Wexler begins a painting by first making drawings, often in charcoal, and carefully studying his motif from different angles to determine the best vantage point. He sometimes uses binoculars, because he wants to study the exact form of the house of some other detail in the distance, even though he may not use all of it in the final painting. He still needs to know what it looks like. In all his paintings he tries to include something that indicates the presence of mankind – houses, roads, or fields.

When Wexler starts the canvas, he brushes in the first thin layers of paint, pushing the forms around until he determines the exact location of the horizon line and other basic shapes. At this point, he often writes a detailed plan for the painting. Although he always retains the major outlines of the scene before him, he does make minor adjustments and add imaginative detail as he works. He says, however, that he is more likely to subtract a detail than add one. He often makes up the color of houses. He may shift the direction of a line of trees to reinforce perspective. Sometimes he adds details f bare trees to a mountain mass of soft foliage to give some sharp contrast to the overall texture. He shifts clouds and shadows from other clouds and forms to build structure, sometimes using shadows cast from trees or other objects outside the frame of the picture.

Wexler often camps out at a site to be there early in the morning, or he may stay on location for a few days. In any event, his supplies are extensive and well organized, for he says he believes in comfort. He uses a French easel, a folding chair, and a small patio umbrella – though, if possible, he tries to set up in the shade. He carries a knapsack with lunch, a radio, a hot plate for coffee, plastic bags in case of rain, and bug spray, which he uses on the painting as well as on himself. He notes that gnats prefer blue paint. He occasionally takes a nap or just sits and looks. To overcome the difficulty of transporting wet paintings without problems from scratches or dirt, he has devised a system of tacking strips to the side of a stretcher so they extend above the surface of the painting, covering the whole with cardboard, and securing it with elastic ropes and clamps.

Wexler usually prepares his own canvas, using a finely woven Belgian linen, which he sizes with rabbit-skin glue and then double- or triple-primes with white lead for a very smooth surface. He prefers Dutch Boy white lead, which, unfortunately, is no longer sold in this country, but he says it is available in Canada. He uses bristle brushes to lay in the canvas and then switches to small sables. His stretchers, even for small canvases, are a heavy-duty variety which are very well-made – smooth and straight, with no warping. A friend [St. Julian Fishburne] who is a restorer has, over the years, supplied him with many 19th-century stretchers.

Today the galleries in New York and art publications are finally showing all kinds of representational work, and Wexler is beginning to benefit from his many years of dedication to a realist vision. His work is being bought for corporate and public collections, he has been in over 100 invitational and competitive exhibitions, and his solo shows have been selling well. After many years as a member of the First Street Gallery, a SoHo cooperative, he recently became affiliated with Far Gallery.

However, when George Wexler first began working from nature, his position required him to muster the courage to stand up to the exceptional social and critical pressures of the New York art world. His account of his career is an interesting one. He spent his first 18 years in Brooklyn, served in the Army for three years, and returned to New York for four years at Cooper Union School of Art. Then he went to Michigan State University to earn an MA and from 1950 to 1957 was assistant professor of design there. In 1957 he came to New Paltz, where today he is a professor of painting at the State University of New York College at New Paltz.

As a teenager, Wexler studied at the Brooklyn Museum and did a form of New York social realism – beggars and street scenes – although he says that at that age he had no real understanding of his subjects. During the years in Michigan, and when he first came to New Paltz – a total of eight years – he worked abstractly. For a period of six months, he did work that was completely nonobjective. And he was quite successful in showing and selling his work. Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., was one of his early collectors.

Despite his successes, Wexler became increasingly uneasy and dissatisfied with what he was doing. He attributes part of the change to the influence of his new environment, the country around New Paltz. Gradually, around 1960, he began working from nature, evolving an expressionistic style of landscape which grew more structured, more detailed, and truer to natural color as the years passed. Studying the slides of his work over the past 30 years provides a fascinating review of his development. Some interesting transitional work is seen in his series of paintings of views from the New York State Thruway, which resulted from a short period of weekly drives to Syracuse to teach. These works have a strong abstract design and color drived from the road and also indicate the beginning of his observation of landscape.

When he began working from nature, his original collectors lost interest, and he and his wife, who also works in a realist style, began to feel isolated from the art world around them. Eventually, though, they did search out and find support from association with other realist artists in New York, people like Gabriel Laderman, Lennart Anderson, Philip Pearlstein, and Theophil Groell. He continued to exhibit, and his work was included in Alan Bussow’s beautiful book, A Sense of Place: The Artist and the American Land.

George Wexler’s philosophy of art has undergone a corresponding change. He has become increasingly militant about promoting a realist vision. His is not simply a partisan response but a carefully thought-out point of view. A strong influence on his thinking has been John Gardner’s On Moral Fiction. Although Gardner primarily discusses literature, his ideas are applicable to all the arts. Of particular interest is Gardner’s criticism of the emphasis on surface texture, rather than structure and meaning, in the contemporary arts.

Rejecting the modern formalist tradition, Wexler says that art is an illusion and not a thing defined by terms such as form, color, shape, texture, line, or brushstroke. These are simply the tools, not the goal. He works for the line or stroke to lose its separate identity and become part of the illusion, the edge of a tree or land. He finds excitement in bridging the gap between putting a mark down and making the mark become something else. And he rejects the oft-quoted dictum about respecting the picture plane. Recently, he has been reading books on perspective and finds a whole new world of possibilities in the study. He says, for instance: Why not break holes in the picture plane to create an illusion of depth?

Wexler does not agree with the goals of the New Realism as they are outlined by Wolf Kahn in the November 1979 issue of American Artist. He takes particular issue with the tendencies to make the subject neutral and uninteresting in its own right and to organize the canvas in a flat, decorative pattern. As Kahn explains, these are extensions of the formalist aesthetic. Just as the abstract artist made his whole work a neutral thing, the New Realist makes the objects in a painting into things rather than illusions of things in the real world. Wexler also finds the emphasis on serial images artificial, simply because there are only a limited number of subjects anyway, and artists have been using them for centuries.

For Wexler, it is not enough to depict the real world in a neutral, objective way. The artist must also feel deeply about his or her subject and express positive, life-affirming emotions. Such an attitude, by definition, produces focus and depth, both technically and emotionally. Wexler compares his thinking to the process of a cabinetmaker who uses a knowledge of joinery, woods, finishes, and skill with tools to produce a beautifully crafted piece of furniture suited for a specific purpose. The end product of this knowledge and these tools is the crafted object, not the tools themselves. To frame the tools, to make the art object a thing, is a form of degeneration.

Wexler says that form is not the reason for painting; it is merely a tool to say something more important. Life is not form, but life is the reason for painting. Paraphrasing Gardner, Wexler says that all great art is an affirmation of life and the good in life. There have been exceptions, minor artists who have depicted evil, but they have remained minor; if art dramatizes evil, it is not good. The great artists, Rembrandt for example, were all positive, affirming the wonder of life and living it.

White Mountain #2, 1975, oil, 32x49. Courtesy Burlington Mills.
Having painted this work completely out-of-doors during a hot, sultry, summer's day, Wexler says: "I attempted, primarily through color, to capture the heat of the day.  It was important to do all of the painting while suffering through the mugginess, because my reaction to the heat permeated every brushstroke."

The Hudson from Artists' Rock #2, 1978, oil, 26x33. This is one of several paintings Wexler completed in the Catskills from places utilized by some Hudson River School painters. "I climbed to my sites, carrying 40 pounds of gear," comments the artist. "Later, I discovered that the 19th-century artists carried only pads, pencils, and occasionally watercolors.  Their oil paintings were done in the comfort of their studios, from sketches."

The New Response: Contemporary Painters of the Hudson River
Show at:
Albany Institute 1985-86 (Nov-Jan)
Vassar College 1986 (Jan-Mar)
Artists Choice Museum 1986 (Apr-May)

Shortly after moving to New Paltz in 1957, the artist switched from an Abstract-Expressionist mode to an expressionistic approach to the landscape. By the middle 1960s, he had completely immersed himself in the possibilities of realism. Typically, his paintings are panoramic in scope, while conveying a wide range of details. The paintings tend to be small in scale, their surfaces as smooth as polished teak. The palette is deliberately limited to subtle gradations of blue and green.

For Wexler, landscape is an immense area bathed in light and shadow. He can depict a brightly glowing stand of trees right next to one locked in shadow. A deft master of perspective, he repeatedly documents long views in which farms, factories, roads, bridges, and other signs of man’s presence accent or define the landscape. In direct contrast to Frederic Church’s painterly exuberance, Wexler approaches his subject matter with a meticulousness that is both respectful and contemplative.

Modern Maturity
June-July 1985
by Linda Hubbard

Displayed prominently on the wall of artist George Wexler’s studio is a checklist: Eyeglasses, paper towels, bag, spirits, clean brushes, radio/tapes, coffee, lunch, armband, camera, canvas, motorized easel. These items are essential to Wexler’s work, for he is not a painter who thrives in a reclusive, garreted, urban setting. Rather, he is one who embraces nature.

Of all the living landscape artists, it is Wexler who adheres closest to the Hudson River School of the 19th century. But when he compared his paintings to the classic works, he discovered that, while they share the practice of working from nature, the results are landscapes of very different feelings and hues.

Acclaim for - and sales of - his landscapes have come only recently to Wexler, 60. His work is now being bought for corporate and private collections. And last year a show at Fischbach Gallery in New York City, where he is represented, was reviewed well.

“Wexler is the painter of a great outdoors…harking back to a period when the landscape was grand, awesome and unsullied,” wrote one critic. “[He] is atypically modern: without irony, without loss of faith in nature, he translates the special vocabulary of epic American landscape painting into works that almost have the clarity of engravings.”

The artist’s home, shared with his sculptress wife, Thyra Davidson, is situated in the wood by a pond, accessible only by a dirt road. The wilderness feeling is accentuated by the rugged cliffs of the Shawangunk Mountains that rise above it. Yet they are only a 20-minute drive from New Paltz, where he teaches fine arts at State University of New York.

Wexler takes painting trips along the Hudson River and in the Catskills, sometimes working at the exact sites the 19th-century landscape artists used. “I camp at my sites, or hike, carrying a 40-pound pack,” he says. “I thought this was the way Cole, Durand, Church and the others worked. Then I learned that they carried only pads, pencils and occasionally watercolors. They did their oil paintings in their studios.”

Because of size, the artist sometimes works on large canvases indoors. (Smaller canvases measuring 26” by 33” often take 18 outdoor sessions of four hours each.)

But Wexler’s studio painting is done from drawing and memory, not from photographs.

“Slides do not provide me with the right kind of information,” Wexler explains.

He began his artistic career as an abstract expressionist. He met with initial success, had a number of shows, and sold to prominent collectors. But after moving to New Paltz in 1957, he grew dissatisfied with his work, becoming increasingly affected by his surroundings.

In 1960, he began working from nature and evolved an expressionistic style of landscapes. This switch – and his move to even more realism in the mid-‘60s – turned off many of his early collectors, and both he and his wife, also a realist, became partially alienated from the center of the New York art world.

Now success has once again caught up with him. “I feel fortunate; I was ready for the break,” he says. “Looking back 30 years at my art, there was nothing I didn’t do at one time.”

Much like the Hudson River School artists, Wexler believes an artist must feel deeply about his or her subject and that art should reflect a positiveness about life. “Life is the reason for painting,” he says. “All great art is an affirmation of life and the good in life.”

Art News
Nov. 1989
-R.B.

George Wexler
Fischbach

George Wexler has lived and painted in the Catskills for the last 30 years, claiming as his own the vistas that first inspired the painters of the Hudson River School. But for the most part, he eschews the sense of drama and romanticism that informed the work of his 19th-century predecessors.

There are no figures in his oil paintings, but the human presence is evoked by the farm buildings and homes depicted. Although almost all Wexler’s pictures have been painted on the spot, there is considerable variety in the compositions. Some works emphasize the diagonal thrust of mountains, others the horizontality of stands of trees and distant skies; in some paintings Wexler conveys the geometric patterns of cultivated fields, while in others he concentrates on hillocks, mounds of earth, lakes, and curving roads.

Wexler’s palette is quite subdued; it is usually limited to a few shades of green, pale blues, some browns, and orange, with an occasional touch of pink or earthy yellow. Thousands of tiny brushstrokes, restrained and barely visible, suggest individual leaves and the play of light on trees and grass.

The title View from Olana alludes to the eccentric castle that Frederic Church built for himself in the mountains. We do not see the building, but look down on a clearing and clusters of trees and beyond to a body of pale blue water under a pale sky and orangy-white clouds at the horizon. Hardly visible in the distant waters are parallel streaks of pink – an unexpected effect that brings the work to life.

Wexler’s painstaking technique and self-effacing esthetic go against the grain of current art-world fashion. His paintings provide a welcome sense of quiet contemplation.

Art & Antiques Magazine, Nov. 1989
by Jed Perl

George Wexler’s paintings of the densely wooded landscape of the northeastern United States look topographically exact, but their precision also makes them feel dreamlike, neurotically self-absorbed. I imagine that Wexler has found the inspiration for his deep vistas and lush valleys encircled by mountain peaks in the paintings of the Hudson River School. Maybe it’s a viewer’s sense that Wexler is recalling nineteenth-century conventions, even as he’s looking out at our world, that gives these tightly rendered scenes their frozen nostalgia. Wexler never offers us an experience of space: his color – which runs to olive greens and mustard yellows and steel grays – is closed and recessive; his details don’t build into a satisfactory whole. Nevertheless, I am held by the very insistence of Wexler’s technique. Reaching for the romantic sublime he ends up with the mundane surreal. It’s as if Bierstadt were becoming Magritte: an interesting proposition.
(Fischbach, New York)

Hudson Valley Newspapers, Sept 1992
by Karen Torma

When looking at the landscapes of New Paltz artist George Wexler - from lush green forests to peaceful country fields, from rolling hills to jagged rocky mountaintops, from quiet winding rivers to wild ocean shores - it soon becomes apparent that this is an artist who loves the outdoors, and his paintings take the viewer to a natural world far away from the pressures and stress of modern life.

Wexler's upcoming exhibit focuses on the rugged landscapes of the American West, quite a change of pace for an artist best known for his Hudson Valley landscapes.  An exhibit of ten paintings and six drawings by Wexler will be on view from Saturday, October 3 through Saturday, October 24 at the Fischbach Gallery at 24 West 57th Street in Manhattan (212)759-2345.  There will be a reception for the artist on opening day, October 3 from 3:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.

A centerpiece of the exhibit is Wexler's massive "West Coast Landscape" (oil on canvas, 1991-92).  The canvas measures 48" x 88" and depicts a landscape of rock outcroppings, valleys and roadways disappearing into the horizon.

"I've been doing landscapes for many years, but it's been a long time since I've done one this large," Wexler said.  "I painted this scene outdoors just outside San Diego during the winter.  I do all my work outdoors, but some of the most beautiful places out West are most interesting in winter.  That makes it difficult, because many areas of California, Arizona and New Mexico get very cold in winter."

The subject matter of his latest paintings is very different from the Hudson Valley region.  The light, the shape of the land and the colors found out West may seem strange to visitors from the East.  Wexler said the dominant color in the Hudson Valley is green; out West it is orange.

Wexler's love of art and the outdoors has lasted a lifetime.  He received his first art training through the WPA program during the Depression, and later studied at the prestigious Cooper Union in Manhattan.  The school accepts a limited number of highly talented students who receive full scholarships to perfect their art.  Wexler went on to earn his bachelor's from New York University.  He then earned his master's degree from Michigan State University, where he taught art for seven years before coming to teach at SUNY New Paltz in 1957.  He retired after a 30-year teaching career in 1987.

He shares his love of art and travel with his wife, Thyra Davidson, an accomplished artist who is best known for sculpture.  They have three sons: Andrew, a guidance counselor and father of two in Schenectady; James, a Desert Storm veteran and father of two at Fort Hood army base, Texas; and Dan, a microbiologist teaching at Marquette University in Wisconsin.  Dan is currently busy managing the campaign of his wife, Ingrid Buxton, who is running for Congress in that state.

Art continues to be a passion for the Wexlers.  "After my retirement my wife and I travelled all over looking for new subjects to paint," he said.  "We spent two winters in Kauai."  He said Hawaii was beautiful, but favors the wide open vistas of the American West.  Wexler says the Hudson Valley will always be close to his heart.  He cites the Hudson Valley School of painters like Frederick Church and John Kensett as his major influences.

"I find Kensett's work to be the most satisfying," he said.  Wexler also cites the French Barbizon painters and English artist John Constable as personal favorites.

"I love the Hudson Valley," Wexler said.  "It's my home."

Art In America Magazine, Feb 1993
by Ken Johnson

For some 30 years, George Wexler has been following in the footsteps of the Hudson River School painters, recording the spectacular Upstate New York landscape. But he hasn’t, for the most part, gone in for the kinds of picturesque melodrama or fancy tours-de-force of illusionism associated with Cole and Church. In the spirit of late 20th-century realism, his paintings have tended to be more matter-of-fact, more about carefully looking and painstakingly recording. With some works in this exhibition, however, Wexler has ventured into rather more exotic terrain. The most arresting pictures are of places out West that look almost otherworldly. West Coast Landscape is a spectacular panoramic view (48 by 88 inches) of mountainous terrain painted in a meticulous, sharp-focused style that calls to mind such Renaissance painters as Bellini or Dhrer. A dry surface and bleached hues give it a look of fresco. The foreground is occupied by a shadowy pile of craggy boulders. Beyond is a peaceful, sunlit valley where farm fields are sparsely punctuated by trees and a few buildings. In the distance an elevated highway is visible, its modernity incongruous against the awesome, primordial backdrop. There is something mythic about this painting. It doesn’t seem an objective study of a particular site but rather a pantheistic vision of creation.

In a smaller work painted closer to home, Wexler pushes the symbolist aspect further: The Wallkill Near Tuttletown is a decidedly dreamlike view across a stream to a weirdly barren landscape. Flinty rocks emerge from the still, light-streaked water near the shore. Three bare-limbed, twisted trees rise from the land. Farther away, just beyond a knob of bald ground, a simple gray house looks sadly isolated. Illuminated by a cold, chalky light, the place seems haunted, purgatorial and, as such, more mindscape than landscape.

In a picture like The Freer Place, the oneiric gives way to Wexler’s more familiar naturalism. An old farmhouse and barn engulfed by trees and bushes, a glimpsed pond, rumpled, scrubby land all around: the facts are attentively recorded with a fine, flickering brush. But still the real is suffused with romance. A rosy evening sky and a seemingly uninhabited house establish a feeling of melancholy, as though the painting (or the painter) were mourning modernity’s abandonment of nature.

Some of Wexler’s paintings can seem perfunctory exercises in 19th-century-style depiction: The Pacific from Anahola, for instance, is marred by a garish but blandly painted turquoise ocean in the distance. On the whole, Wexler is not very generous with paint – one wishes the paintings could be sensually richer. In his best works, however, there is a genuinely affecting combination of mimesis and poetry.

Painting The Landscape
Watson Guptic Publications
by Elizabeth Leonard

George Wexler: A Hudson River Painter

George Wexler’s paintings are all derived from actual landscapes. Wexler usually spends several days each spring driving around the Hudson Valley and Catskill Mountains. Stopping at areas that have spatial and topographical qualities that stir him emotionally, he makes quick pencil and charcoal sketches and takes some black-and-white Polaroid shots.

Back in his studio, he studies the drawings and snapshots and reduces the number of possible motifs to about three or four places in which he plans to work. Then he returns to the areas and decides whether he will paint there in the morning or afternoon, or on a gray day, or any combination of these.

Once he starts painting, he divides up his week and works on five or six paintings simultaneously. He returns to the subjects every day, usually camping out in a tent-trailer. This routine continues until fall.

The length of time a painting takes depends upon size, complexity, and unforeseen problems. A few of Wexler’s large paintings are completed in his studio during the winter months.

Working Methods:
Wexler’s palette consists of titanium-zinc white, Naples yellow, zinc yellow, cadmium yellow light, cadmium yellow medium, cadmium yellow deep, flesh, cobalt green, cerulean blue, cobalt blue, ultramarine, Thalo blue, Winsor violet, magenta, chromium oxide, cadmium green, sap green, terra verte, viridian, Thalo green, olive green, yellow ocher, raw sienna, burnt sienna, Indian red, raw umber, burnt umber, and Mars black.

His brushes are bristles and sables. He starts painting very loosely with large brushes, then progressively moves to smaller ones. To finish a painting he uses Winsor and Newton series 12, nos. 00 to 2.

Wexler begins with drawings and photographs and usually with a small oil study. To capture architectural details such as distant buildings, he even uses binoculars. Next he lays in a rough underpainting, then moves in on smaller details. In some areas, he allows the underpainting to show through later layers of paint; in other areas, he covers the underpainting totally. For Wexler, there is no particular set order. He roams all over his palette as his instincts and the needs of his painting dictate.

View From Mohonk Farm:
40” x 50” (102 x 127 cm), Oil on canvas, Collection of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, New York City.
In View from Mohonk Farm, Wexler wanted to capture the quality of the late afternoon light and to emphasize the feeling of space by introducing a complex foreground. Before he began this work, he had done a smaller painting, one that he wanted to develop further. The size of the large painting was determined by a gift from a friend – an early American stretcher.

In the painting process, the large oil underwent a fairly radical change. Wexler had always wanted a strong foreground so he began by including a large bush up front. When winter came he stopped working on the painting, dissatisfied with the way it was developing.

The painting lay around Wexler’s studio for about two years, until one winter when Wexler gave himself just one week to bring the painting to life. He began by painting out the bush he had concentrated on previously, then he added a new one.

To capture the feel of the bush in late summer, Wexler invented the foreground, putting it together from memory and from some rhododendron branches. He began by putting the branches in a can, keeping them at eye level; then he moved them up ;and then below eye level. Painting what he saw as he manipulated the branches, he added the strong foreground that he had wanted when he first began to work.

When Wexler thought that the painting was nearly complete, he pulled it together by lightening lights and darkening darks and by making the edges softer or harder.