For artist Janet Bruce, the forced isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic was an opportunity to turn inward, to seek solace in nature and delve into a deep exploration of color. Directing her attention to the color theories of Goethe and Eugène Chevreul, as well as modern and contemporary colorists, Bruce produced over 360 color studies. This extensive foray is recorded in both a binder thick with diagrams, notes, and photographs, and the astonishing 13- by 8.5-foot installation “Color Study: On a Southern Horizon,” which features 247 of Bruce’s color analyses in a grid arrangement. These provocative artifacts are on view at Les Yeux du Monde in Bruce’s luminous show, “Locus Amoenus.” Latin for a place of safety and comfort, the title references not just a physical place—in this case, Bruce’s studio and the natural landscape she inhabits—but also a state of mind.
Hard work and introspection is evident in Bruce’s thrilling “Tree,” in which she pulls out all the stops. Bruce uses pigment and brushwork to describe the effects of light and shadow and delineate the features of the landscape, like the shape and texture of the vegetation or the crooked progress of a stream, but also to impart a sense of energy. Lavender and white zig-zagging lines buzz across the surface with fervid exuberance.
Bruce’s color choices and pairings are beautiful in themselves, but they also have a distinct veracity. This is notable in her treatment of sun versus sunlight. Low on the horizon, the sun has a golden cast, but when it hits the forest floor, Bruce adds green to yellow to achieve the peculiar, almost day-glo, effect of sun raking across moss.
“Tree” alternates between representation and abstraction. We perceive a woodland scene with foreground, middle ground, and background, while admiring the dazzling stew of pigment and gesture that roils across the surface and elevates an ordinary scene into an extraordinary painting.
The perfectly calibrated composition “All Four Seasons in One Day” draws on all of Bruce’s talent. Though a more abstract work, it shares with “Tree” a similar organization with a kind of Y shape taking the place of the central tree. Bruce balances the work chromatically with lavender passages in the upper left and lower right, and gray in the opposite quadrants. At the center, cinnamon and rosy purple converge to form the Y. A calligraphic swish of black meanders in and around its periphery, concluding in a squiggly flourish at the bottom.
To say Bruce uses pale yellow and white to compose her sun does a disservice to the complex passages she comes up with. The eye causes these mélanges of hues to coalesce into an impression of a particular color, but make no mistake, the artist’s colors are the sum of many parts. To suggest wind-tossed branches fleetingly obscuring the sun, she adds flicks of paint—cream, pale green, and brown. Her rosy aura of rays staining the sky perfectly captures how the heavens look at sunset when it clears after rain. The pigment’s application throughout the work conveys the effects of weather and atmosphere—sheets of rain, blustery wind, raw temperature. Gray and lilac suggest a front pushing across the sky or the unrelenting gloom of heavy cloud cover.
“High Sun Day” may be a small work, but it grabs your attention. The bold, yet lyrical brushwork and nuanced palette of yellow and a tantalizing green strikes the perfect chromatic and gestural chord. Within the tangle of yellow strokes, you can see the speed of application and get a sense of brush moving paint along the surface. The areas where the pigment is more thickly applied act like highlights, with the thinner areas appearing to dissolve into the background.
Bruce’s inspiration for her series “Four Seasons” comes from Nicolas Poussin and Cy Twombly—she embraces both the pastoral landscape tradition of Poussin and Twombly’s formal approach to materials and technique. Bruce has synthesized and distilled her seasons so that what we really get is sense memory impressions. Whether it’s winter’s frosted suspended animation, summer sun on greenery, a tawny scrawl suggestive of fall foliage, or the shimmering luminism of “Spring,” each painting summons up a distinct time of year through abbreviated means.
A handful of the artist’s “Materiali/Immateriali” prints hang in the show, but there are others available for viewing in the gallery’s flat files. These are well worth your time. Produced using color viscosity and silk aquatint (printmaking techniques), you can see the ravishing effects in the ink’s movement across the plate—drizzly in some places, vaporous in others—as well as the riveting interplay between the different hues.
Like so many of us, Bruce had very different plans for 2020. According to gallery director Hagan Tampellini, Bruce had been accepted into the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts residency program in Auvillar, France, but due to the pandemic, the program was canceled. Undeterred, she moved on to plan B: finding her locus amoenus in her own backyard.