Meyer Gallery | June 19-25, 2020 | Santa Fe, NM

Moving landscape

Douglas Fryer is attuned to those fleeting moments as well as to the unexpected beauty after the shadow sweeps away the gilt.

In her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard writes, “Today is one of those excellent January partly cloudies in which light chooses an unexpected part of the landscape to trick out in gilt, and then the shadow sweeps it away. You know you’re alive. You take huge steps, trying to feel the planet’s roundness arc between your feet.”

Moonlight and Desert Wash, oil on panel, 12 x 24"

Douglas Fryer is attuned to those fleeting moments as well as to the unexpected beauty after the shadow sweeps away the gilt. “I’ll pick subjects I have an aesthetic response to,” he explains. “There is a balance between beauty and truth. I try to bring out the beauty that hasn’t been seen before. I’ll have an aesthetic response to a mountain range or to a ditch with weeds in it that no one would see as picturesque. I can see the potential to bring out its beauty. I paint the beauty that I’ve caught out of the corner of my eye.”

Passing Rain, oil on panel, 14 x 14”

His paintings are more than accepted norms of beauty—snow on a mountain top, a colorful sunset. As a religious man, he knows, seeks and sees the beauty that is in all of creation. “There was a spiritual creation before a physical creation,” he explains. “All things that are created have a spirit, an intelligence, that gladdens our hearts and beautifies the world. I don’t preach through my work but I do want to declare good and beautiful things in a truthful way that has true sentiment but not sentimentality. I judge my work and the work of others by the inspiration I gain by looking at it.”

Stone Home, Spring City (Winter), oil on panel, 10 x 20”

He says, “Too often we assume we have to make a painting like a photograph or like other paintings that depict a similar subject. We have to recognize the metaphysical aspects of the scene that have to do with the spirit and the passage of time. I can paint a tree rendered in detail like a photograph that stops motion. But when I was there, I was moving through the landscape looking at the tree from different points of view. There was a breeze blowing. When I’m in the studio there is the memory of those metaphysical things and I can remember the movement of the sun as it was shining on the tree and disappeared when a cloud passed.

Thistle Creek and the Marysvale Branch, oil on panel, 36 x 36”

I feel it all as I revisit in my memory. I hear the birds and the insects and the rustle of the leaves.”

Fryer paints with trowels, palette knives and brushes, reveling in the qualities of the paint, eschewing detail. He says, “Suggestions of reality can be far more descriptive of a thing. In my work I feel I can get closer to reality by the suggestion of forms. It also allows me to consider the metaphysical message of time, memory, spirit, belief.”

Fryer’s latest paintings will be in an exhibition, Moving Landscape, at Meyer Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, June 19 through 25.