Landscape always has been about more than pretty scenes of nature. All of the genre's masters, from Jacob van Ruysdael to John Constable, pursued underlying motives, whether celebrating divine grandeur or affirming the virtues of the rural life against the advancing industrial age.
Americans kicked things up a notch by associating the westward-sprawling continent with notions of manifest destiny. From the Hudson Valley to Yosemite, painters exalted the God-given land upon which, so the story went, the great dream of democracy would unfold. Now, we've filled out that land and come to understand at what price, both to nature and the original inhabitants. Still, landscape remains a quasi-spiritual pursuit in American art.
In the paintings of Californian Nila Oakes, whose All Who Wander: Reflections from Journeys Past can be seen at the Charleston Heights Arts Center through November 14, the land is an ineffable quantity, a living being which cannot be taken in at a glance. Indeed, her oil paintings appear to be not literal depictions of scenes, but compressed impressions of topography and geosphere. You get the sense that what you see is defined by what lies beyond the horizon, off the picture plane—as in a sense it is.
Her expansive landscapes bring home the point that much of what we see on Earth is inscribed on our retinas by light filtered through an atmosphere constantly in flux. In "Light Pool," a low landscape of rolling green turns gray as hills rise on the left, figuratively joined with overlapping masses of clouds, wispy here, cottony there, the interstices bleeding light which traces patterns on the land. Next to it, "Emerging Epiphany"—how's that for spiritual?—describes the very idea of a "lowering" sky. The thick, gray-black band at the top of the picture dissolves into the folds of a cloud mass that seems to rupture at its lowest, fullest point, shedding rays like rain.
Oakes uses a broad, shallow format to evoke atmospheric effects that, were they possible to depict at all, might take place over several time zones and many hours. "The High Road" employs the convention of a ribbon trailing away from the viewer, both to anchor you in a here-and-now and to suggest that what you're seeing is a collapsed and distilled representation of what you have seen and will be seen on the path: skeins of gray lifting from low hills on the right and arcing across the sky.
"Touch Down" could be the flip side of this scene. A roiling mass of blue-gray grazes the hilltops to the left, seemingly devouring a vein of brown as it rises into a sky that is clear and blue to the right, over a placid plain. It is not a depiction of a tornado, but perhaps the process of wind and storm imagined over time, pulling dirt skyward, leaving behind pacific fecundity.
In "Nevada Eastbound," the bulky sky appears more substantial than the indistinct land, a pale sliver of sauterne green which could be the final striation of light to emerge from above. It is the most mysterious and engaging canvas here.
By contrast, the more literal Oakes tries to be, the less successful the product. The busy, nearly outlined cloud layers of "Stratus Variation;" the distant, olive tidal pools of "Lifting Fog with Blue;" the foreground grasses of "Mono Lake V"; all pull the viewer back to Earth—and it's a sad landing after soaring over the other landscapes.
Still, at her best, Oakes seeks that ideal dynamism in nature, and the show seems something larger than the small Charleston Heights Gallery can contain.