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Although she is not a native of Wisconsin, Lee Weiss has been
a resident of Madison for most of the years of her painting
career, and Wisconsin is proud to claim her as its own. From
the 1960's through the 1980's she has built a national reputation
for her adventuresome use of the watercolor medium. Weiss has
participated in every major American watercolor competition
during this time and her pieces are in numerous museum and corporate
collections. She repeatedly wins awards in these competitions
for her paintings that capture both the magic and mystery of
nature in large scale pieces that depict close-up views of the
landscape. With this career-long survey we are celebrating the
25th year of Weiss working in the State of Wisconsin and focusing
upon her unique contribution to painting in watercolor. We hope
to provide viewers with an opportunity to evaluate a large portion
of the artist's work, to outline her themes and subjects of
the past 25 years and to explain her methods of working and
the technical developments she has contributed to the field.
Lee Weiss was born Elyse Crouse in California in 1928. As a
youngster, she had always been involved in art and at 18 attended
the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland from 1946-47.
At college she studied color theory, design and drawing. She
was married to Dr. Wallace John Chapman from 1947-55 and Weiss
worked as a successful interior designer in the San Francisco
Bay area during this time. They had two daughters. Weiss married
Professor Leonard Winchell Weiss, a widower with two young girls
in 1956, and renewed her interest in painting. In 1957 she audited
several classes at San Jose State College taught by a former
classmate from the California College of Arts and Crafts, the
late Nels Eric Oback.
Weiss had always enjoyed watercolor painting as a student, and
now as a young mother of four children under five years of age,
she prized the ease with which the quickness of this medium
enabled her to fit painting into her busy schedule. Oback realized
that Weiss had already developed a distinctive approach to painting
by the time she came to study with him and he determinedly advised
her to go home and paint. From this point on Weiss began painting
seriously. In 1958 she attended six critiques with Alexander
Nepote who set up a different aesthetic problem for his students
each month. Nepote claimed that each quadrant of a painting
should be interesting on its own and that artworks should entertain
the eye and the mind in a combination that appealed to both
the sensual and the cerebral. From Oback, Weiss received the
confidence and encouragement to follow her own lead. From Nepote
she learned problem solving and the process of critiquing one's
own work.
Aside from these areas of professional study, the artist is
primarily self-taught and by 1959, Weiss was exhibiting in juried
shows in the Bay Area, including the San Francisco Museum of
Art. By the time her family moved from California to Madison,
where Dr. Weiss is a Professor of Economics at the University
of Wisconsin, she had won 17 awards, including two Best of Show
and ten First Awards. Weiss received a solo exhibition at the
California Palace of the Legion of Honor just before coming
to the Midwest.
Stones and Grass and Winter Landscape, both of
1962, are good examples of her early Madison paintings. Both
are painted in the muted earth tones found in the Midwest in
November and March. In the first painting, the stones are negative
spaces of white unpainted paper suggested by the outlines in
brown and gray of shadows underneath. This attention to positive
and negative space became a strong interest in Weiss' later
compositions and she was already developing a calligraphic quality
to her use of the brush. One can feel the artist at work creating
the grass, rocks and trees and Weiss was already developing
her signature close-up views of nature. These early pieces like
Cove, 1963, with its painted areas suggesting the meeting
of rocky outcrop and sandy shore with water's edge and Paisaje
Mexicano, 1964, where different blocks of watercolor washes
suggest the hillsides of a Mexican landscape, exhibit the artist
working in an orthodox manner and with traditional subject matter.
At this point in time, Weiss became concerned with finding a
means by which she could enrich the surface qualities of a watercolor
painting while still retaining its transparency and the inner
light of the white of the paper. Weiss sought to make the surfaces
more interesting without sacrificing content. She wanted to
achieve this without overpainting or scraping which would damage
the surface of the paper or destroy the transparent quality
of the work. Weiss was originally attracted to watercolor for
its subtlety and the unexpected and unpredictable qualities
it possesses that enabled her to create a wide variety of light
and atmosphere conditions. It was just this unpredictable quality
of her medium that turned a studio accident in 1965 into the
answer she had sought for increased texture in her surfaces.
As she has always limited herself to transparent watercolor,
brushes, and water, she thought one solution to her surface
interest could be found in her use of papers. While experimenting
with a hard-surfaced paper Weiss decided to scrap the painting
she had started and turned it face down onto her work table
in order to start a painting on the back side of the paper.
When the reverse also turned out to be a failure, Weiss peeled
up the paper to dispose of it and discovered that the still-wet
pigmented surface on the first side had acquired some interesting
paint areas from its time spent pressed to the work table.
The artist began a series of trials in which the paper was repeatedly
flipped allowing paint from a freshly painted side of the work
to become deposited on the surface of the work table. When the
paper was turned from side to side, it picked up deposits of
pigment as what had been laid onto the table surface transferred
onto the paper when they came into contact with each other.
Rock Garden, 1965, and Autumn Ridge, 1966, are
good examples of Weiss' early explorations into the creation
of textures. In both cases, she manages to suggest rocks, earth
and flora with line, color and texture. A texture so alive and
inviting that it can be felt like the naps and slubs of different
kinds of woven fabrics. At the same time, these watercolors
still retain their transparency. The discovery of these textural
effects became a vehicle to depict Weiss' impressions and also
suggested subjects to her that could be treated in this fashion.
By the late 1960's Weiss was able to perfect this technique,
mastering its monoprinting quality through three years of experimentation.
Weiss coordinates her selection of colors from side to side
so that those deposited upon the table will interact with those
already on the paper to develop texture and dense areas of color.
Initially, she begins with a solid abstract painting and turns
the piece back and fourth four or five times. Pigment clings
to the hollows of the paper areas and reveals the high points
of the paper's surface Her paintings, which often look monochromatic,
as in the case of Snow-packed Grasses, 1969; Old Stone,
1971; and Hillside Grasses, 1974, are in fact made up
of a wide spectrum of colors. The monoprinting technique assists
this by allowing a number of pigment infusions and separations.
Textures develop in the dry areas of the painting and ghost
images are created on both sides of the piece. At this point
the artist decides which of the two sides will be her primary
surface and she begins to paint directly upon this. Weiss' construction
of the painting as it develops physically often influences her
final choice of subject and details. She approaches each painting
first in abstract terms and lets what is happening with the
interaction of paint, water and paper suggest subject matter
and composition.
Although she is delighted with the texture afforded to her by
her monoprinting method, Weiss uses this as only one of her
techniques and more than half of her present day pieces are
painted directly with a brush. Never one to use chemicals, salt
or sponges, the artist delights in the mixing, direct application
and lifting out of color on the white paper, all accomplished
with the use of a brush.
In the late 1970's Weiss developed a technique that enabled
her to layer with a brush instead of being dependent upon layering
through monoprinting as a sole source of texture. Layering with
a brush has its own difficulties, the main one being that the
surface of these paintings must be kept uniformly wet in order
to keep the paint workable and alive. It also enables her to
produce different effects like falling snow which is created
by flicking pure water from a brush onto a wet surface of a
painting.
As an example of these combined techniques, Celebration!,
1976, was started by flipping in its early phases but early
on Weiss became involved with the direct application of paint
and the manipulation of the brush. Several reds were layered
and then lifted off in areas with a slightly dry brush to simulate
distance and dimension.
Weiss' technical ability is unique. The fact that these works
are in watercolor often confounds viewers. They are infused
with air, water, earth, light and movement. Although the paintings
are masterfully executed it is the spirit within these watercolors
that is exhilarating. It is clear that we are not looking at
nature but into it through the artist's eyes. Weiss chooses
to work in her studio, away from her subject matter. She does
not work from sketches or slides. These scenes do not exist
and are not observed directly from nature when the painting
is created -- they are not on-location pieces. Instead these
pieces are created from scenes the artist has observed, distilled
and absorbed, storing the details in her memory until she chooses
to recall them in the studio. Away from the location of her
subject she is forced to consider the painting itself, to abstract
from nature what it is she wants to say.
In the history of American art the role of the artist as a chronicler
of nature has always been a strong one. Artists from the Old
World were initially commissioned to tour with exploring expeditions
to paint in detail the people, flora and fauna of the New World
as a documentation to take back to Europe. Later as expansion
westward began across the continent, groups like the Hudson
River School documented the grandeur of America's natural resources
and wonders for their fellow countrymen. The work of artists
like Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, and Thomas Moran suggested
an excitement with which painter and viewer alike looked, as
if for the first time, upon the beauty of the American landscape.
There was no suggestion of an historical past, no castles or
ruins are present. Instead we see a pure landscape as if America
were a paradise created for mankind. Bierstadt and Moran were
known especially for the large scale of pieces showing glaciers,
thunderstorms, mountains and rushing water with a reverence
and a naturalist's sense of observation. Nature is seen here
as awesome but not threatening and it is presented in a poetic
way more so than as a photographic depiction.
The paintings of Lee Weiss have similarities as well as differences
to the work of artists in this School. Her pieces have a feeling
of wonderment at nature. Although she paints in large scale,
Weiss is not interested in capturing the big picture in the
same way as an artist sent to record a grand natural wonder.
Her watercolors are beautiful and non-threatening as are the
works of the Hudson River School, but they show us the wonders
of nature in microcosm. Red Oak, Turning, 1974, shows
us a forest and the life cycle of trees all in a painting of
one section of an oak tree as it turns color in the fall. Glitter
Twigs, 1986, is cold and frosty in choice of color and subject.
Here a tangle of naked branches, sheathed in ice, glitters in
the early morning sun providing us with the visual information
to make us feel the chill in the air and hear the snap of twigs
breaking under the weight of their coating of ice.
From the 1960's on, Weiss strove to develop her work from small
scale depictions of large landscapes to monumental presentations
of landscape details. Although small in size, Quiet Current,
1968, illustrates how Weiss oriented her larger landscapes in
her mature work of the 1970's and 1980's by representing a large
area of the landscape through its details. Here we see grass
at the shore of a pond. Some blades dip into the water, others
lift in the wind. We have clues here to help us determine conditions
of light, atmosphere, time of day and year, and the condition
of water and flow of its current. The viewer comes away from
this piece knowing a great deal about this pond without seeing
the entire body of water. Hillside Grasses presents us
with another landscape as defined by grass. In this case we
are on a hillside as evidenced by the slope of the earth. It
is summer, the grass is full and waves languorously in the summer
breeze. Silence, 1982, presents us with the subject of
grass, this time in a large scale painting of large grass-reeds.
Falling snow begins to blot out areas of green and we can feel
the silence and cold just as we can feel the warmth of summer's
light and breeze in Hillside Grasses. Like the rest of
Weiss' work there is an Oriental sensibility here in the attention
the artist pays toward the selection and presentation of details.
Reeds, caught in a snowstorm become monumental, like a redwood
forest. Weiss seems to say that we can know all of nature's
greatness by paying attention to its smallest component parts.
These paintings are about the essence of nature and the aspects
of nature that we take for granted. Many of these scenes could
take place at the beach, a neighborhood park or in our own backyards
if we took the time to observe, as Weiss does on her walks in
the University of Wisconsin Arboretum near her home. With the
conviction of a conservationist, her work emphasizes that nature
is very fragile and could wither or change before our very eyes.
These spiritual landscapes are created by a woman whose father
was raised in China and who raised his daughter on tales of
the Orient. Weiss however, is not interested in consciously
trying to create pieces with an Oriental sensibility. But her
work, with its distillation of details rather than a continuous
addition and its ability to see larger segments of nature like
mountains in the smaller objects like stones that are part of
the larger whole does relate to the millennia of tradition in
Oriental Art.
Even Weiss' paintings that depict a larger overall area like
View from the Ridge, 1980, with its overhead view of
swirling mists and hills, suggest smaller views. There is a
similarity here between the mist slipping over a hill and the
way in which water, pours over the rocks, in White Water,
1978. The texture here could be ice with cracks or lichens and
moss on rocks reminding us of the individual objects that make
up these large scenes. Pieces like White Water, and Riverbed,
1987, are symphonies of the textures and rhythms of rock and
water, and like the rest of Weiss' work, speak to us with the
observation of a poet, a naturalist and a conservationist.
Weiss is a watercolor painter's watercolorist in that her technical
mastery of a difficult medium is possibly best understood by
those who are familiar with the demands of the medium. She is
always pushing herself, stretching in the work to increase the
scale and to create more complex areas of color. She tries not
to repeat a subject unless she has something more to say about
it. Her pieces that are in a series never occur one after the
other but are often two, three, four or more years apart from
each other in time. For this exhibition we have sought to illustrate
how Weiss has returned to some of these recurring subjects over
the years by hanging the exhibition, organized by subject matter
and chronologically within that organization.
Lee Weiss has developed a way of looking at the world around
her and distilling a poetic beauty from her observations of
nature. She has also devised the techniques necessary to communicate
these expressions in a most effective way.
Since 1962 she has had over 85 solo exhibitions in museums,
art centers and commercial galleries across the country. Her
work is in 25 major corporate collections, 30 museum and university
collections and has been reproduced in over 20 books and national
publications. It is because of the level of her accomplishments
that we are pleased to continue our series of mid-career surveys
of our regional artists with a documentation of the career to
date of artist, Lee Weiss.
Bruce W. Pepich
Director
August 1,1987
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