Light Takes the Tree
The striking turn in Ron Milewicz’s work from paintings of very urban, sharply delineated angular rooftop vistas with which he has been especially identified to handsome graphite drawings of woodland clearings of a very human scale seems singularly curious. He has eschewed too the vibrant, flat, saturated colors of the former in favor of a gamut of richly subtle, shaded and light-infused monochromatic renderings. His new series, “Light Takes the Tree” (a phrase from “The Waking,” a Theodore Roethke poem), leads us to recently cherished woodlands and glades—natural surrounds―and capturing their seasons and moments. Yet both his meticulous, stark cityscapes of metropolitan New York and the idyllic sylvan landscapes that now engage him are quiet, still, and contemplative. The former, with nary a person or plant in sight, and the drawings, divested of color, both achieve a certain noiseless other-worldliness.
Though the immediate reason for this change in imagery is that the artist spends time now in upstate New York and his residency there made a very real change in his surrounds, what he really sought was a reprieve. In moving away from the dizzying hurly-burly of the city and far from the madding crowd, he was seeking respite too from family cares and a retreat from the strife and sorrows of our land. He craved, he said, the hushed calm of the natural world.
Milewicz’s landscapes are not the sweeping perspectives of majestic mountains, vast seas, or overpowering cataclysmic natural events, designed to strike awe at their grandeur, but views of woods and meadows, outcroppings and ponds. They celebrate slim, bare trees with graceful branches; foliage and forest bowers. Arabesque shapes and rolling spaces, as he has described them, are integrated to become rhythmic forms activated by a closely observed and perspicacious play of light and shadow. This is sympathetic nature, of a reassuring and soothing human scale. The imagery asks us to take pleasure and sustenance in, be enchanted by, and even ponder not the extraordinary but readily available sites. And they invite visual exploration.
While the subject matter remains constant, Milewicz engages in diverse compositional gambits, not necessarily abiding by traditional pictorial do’s and don’ts. One bold drawing, Sugar Maple 3, plants a tree front and center to challenge the viewer to circumvent that visual barrier, enter further, and investigate a path or itinerary. There are asymmetrical arrangements and experimentation with decorative motifs such as circular swirls of leaves. For all the lyricism of these drawings, the settings and objects are punctiliously evoked.
Light is important. Shimmering, vaporous light and shadow inhabit and rhythmically enliven settings. Shafts of light introduce movement, pierce foliage, obliterate forms. Just as light overtakes and effaces objects, so too Milewicz’s ingenious technique for representing light through erasure repeats this process. Tones, tonal structure, tonal relationships―about which the artist is a self-described fanatic―are paramount to the character and beauty of these drawings. The method whereby their carefully calibrated ranges have been achieved consists of penciling over the entire sheet, darkening and so defining certain forms. and erasing areas to indicate the effects of light. This process results in the slightly indistinct edges that contribute, along with the creamy white of the exposed Rives paper, to impart to the whole a certain dreaminess and mythic quality. The artist admits he’d been suspicious of the too readily seductive landscapes. And he is right to be suspicious, they are seductive.
Milewicz’s landscape drawings provide a nexus through which to take stock of, appreciate anew, and delight in the basic givens of the world around us. Whether this foray into the woods is a detour in Milewicz’s work, it is a peaceful and dazzling new path.
Aimée Brown Price