Rye Tippett says his inspiration for the collection of his new paintings on display now at Morpeth Contemporary was "based on the moon, how sometimes it just pops out of nowhere, low in the sky just behind the trees, it could be anything really and anywhere...the moon just creates imagination."
This exhibit is different from any you've seen. Mystery and mysticism, surrealism and symbolism, are possibly the best words to describe this body of work. But even those words don't completely do the paintings justice. The pictorial components are precisely painted in realistic detail, but they are far from realism. They are, as Tippett infers, totally imaginative.
He speaks of the moon often seen low and through the trees or hovering large as begins its ascent. You see that throughout this exhibit. In "Olympia," a wide horizontal painting, a large red, white and yellow ship floats low in the sky behind a stand of dark leafless trees. A trail of dark smoke rises into a darkening sky while, below, two tire tracks take your eye through already dark land to the low horizon.
In another wide horizontal painting, "On That Late Winter Evening," it's a big yellow blimp seen through the black trees. This time, a pair of very tiny grey figures are standing on the ground importantly giving scale to the hugeness of the blimp. In these, there is no overt sign of immediate danger, but an ominous sense of something hovering on your horizon that is going to chill you to the core.
But there are also light-hearted paintings in the show. There's "Wilson and the Braeburns" showing a peaceful steer in a landscape with six pretty red apples circling his curly-haired white head and horns. And there's "Outside Any Window" where a silver dove and a smaller black bird with red markings look intently at one another on a clothesline that also has one white and grey sock pinned on. And nearby a pair of those socks is "Hung Out to Dry" along with red and white boxer shorts and a blue cloth. A black cat creeps along the clothesline toward a bird hanging upside down. But the bird does not look too concerned, possibly knowing instinctively the cat is just doing his thing and it can fly anyway anytime it wants.
Birds and cats appear here and there throughout the exhibit. "We Never Sleep" has a grey and black cat perched atop a pile of red lobsters whose eyes are wide open, as are the cat's.
In "Bluebird" a silver and blue bird hangs on a swinging perch inside a partially open blue denim jacket that floats untethered over a spare landscape. And there's a tender work called "Petey's Forever Home" in which Tippett honors the red bird with a small portrait of it in a gold frame suspended inside a brass birdcage whose door is ajar.
There's a long-eared rabbit standing amid yellow flowers that reflect the color of his eyes. And a "Ghost Dog Caught the Katy" in which a small silver dog can be seen riding in a yellow train boxcar bearing its name, "The Katy," as it floats low in a cloud-filled dark sky just over the horizon line.
"I don't feel I ever really choose the animals or anything that I paint," he says in his artist statement. "They just sort of show up, like a horse in the woods when you thought you were alone. I capture them the way they happen." One that clearly just happened captures a rabbit running down a hillside with a long-stem thistle in his mouth, it's bulb shiny purple with hair-like roots blowing around it.
One image that just happened to emerge quite possibly came from Tippett's being strongly drawn to the works of surrealist painter, Arnold Bocklin. In this, two small figures, one lifelike and the other grayed-out and ghostlike, are seen in a night setting rowing up to a large vessel with multiple sails on the horizon that dominates the composition. In his Artist Statement, Tippett says, "I first saw the Bocklin painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or maybe it was the Chicago Institute, since then his painting has had a major influence on my work." He goes on to say, "along with other symbolist artists Franz Von Stuck, Gustav Klimt, Odilon Redon, and Edvard Munch. I feel they could have been my friends."
I strongly recommend this exhibit. Here is a skilled artist who says the ideas he translates into oil paints "...are really just as I find them, like lanterns in the woods, lighting the way back home." Tippett, who is also a published poet, freely offers us a chance to go along with him as he follows his imagination as "if it was the moon."
IF YOU GO:
WHAT: If It Was The Moon, Paintings by Rye Tippett
WHERE: Morpeth Contemporary, 43 West Broad Street, Hopewell
WHEN: Through October 27. Hours, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., Tuesday-Saturday;
' 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Sunday
CONTACT: 609-333-9393. [email protected]
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