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Julian Hatton, Graham Nickson, Rachel Rickert, and Katherine Brad-
ford all work from perception.
Julian Hatton’s
exuberant paintings
often read as abstractions, at first acquaintance, because of the audacity
with which he uses color, but we slowly become aware of their basis
in an awareness of specific places and the character of particular trees,
fields, hedges, and the like; this connection with actuality can be almost
imperceptible but its subtle logic informs the pictures, like the hard to
hear but vital continuo in a Baroque concerto. Like Bonnard’s luminous
improvisations on the landscapes surrounding his home or the places
where he spent time, Hatton’s bold responses to his own environment,
are explosive, light-filled, and apparently idyllic—an upstate New York
Arcadia?
There’s no ambiguity in the relationship of
Graham Nickson’s
beach
scenes and the idealized world of pastoral poetry. Nickson’s terrestrial
paradise is an expanse of sand by the ocean in East Coast America, in-
habited by fit, athletic bathers. His personages are recognizable mem-
bers of our own society: unequivocally modern individuals who practice
Yoga poses, dry themselves, fold beach chairs, and spread towels. Yet
Nickson’s saturated, superheated, unreal color moves us out of the pres-
ent and into an alternative, more perfect world where the long light of