Traywick Gallery, Berkeley, California
Continuing through March 15, 2025
February 8, 2025
The British Romantic landscapist John Constable (1776-1837) once declared, “It will be difficult to name a class of landscape in which the sky is not the keynote, the standard of scale, and the chief organ of sentiment.”
Samantha Fields’ exhibition of recent paintings, “Portents,” with their multiple layers of airbrushed pigment, focuses on the skies of Fields’ Los Angeles as their “chief organ of sentiment.” In the 21st century this organ is one brought about by natural forces subject to physical laws, not the judgments of celestial overseers. Even without God in his heaven, however, the skies retain their fascination and awe. Fields has returned to the skies — and their associated clouds, fog, celestial bodies, fires, and fireworks — after a transitional period of domestic interiors realized during the pandemic lockdown.
“Portents” includes eleven medium-sized to small paintings, all derived from “failed photographs,” i.e., flawed snapshots, replete with photographic ‘mistakes,’ like lens flares, but adapted and perfected during the artist’s lengthy painting process. All are beautiful and mysterious, all imply something that is not yet evident, the promise of a withheld or ambiguous revelation, as Jorge Luis Borges put it. In the aftermath of the recent wildfires, a subject that the artist has explored before, it is easy to interpret the paintings secularly as environmental warnings to Angelenos to get our minds right about rebuilding in the naturally fire-prone Southern California ecosystem, especially given our poisoned political culture.
The gallery notes that “Portents” evokes a fractured world that may be slipping away — a reality that is constantly in flux and just out of reach. “Fields,” they assert, “uses the metaphor of celestial phenomena, such as a total solar eclipse, to articulate this elusive feeling.” The transient phenomena of the natural world are thus caught and preserved in paintings that freeze and condense time for our leisurely contemplation. “Portent,” the show’s eponymous painting, depicts a dust storm or tornado as seen from afar, darkly foreboding swirling masses of muted color that evoke recent natural twister disasters in the American south. Looking at this ominous image I could easily imagine the desperation felt by pre-scientific people who anthropomorphized such brutal force in order to explain it.
“The Path of Totality” presents a wide-angle view of a total eclipse, with the blacked-out sun at the top encircled by an aureole of clouds, and echoed by a tiny sun at the bottom, just above the dark horizon — a scientific anomaly, given poetic license: the heavenly and earthly realms suggest the Latin ut supra ut infra, as above, so below, and the bipartite composition of Raphael’s “Transfiguration.” “Prominence” and “Cathedral” focus on the blackened solar disk in eclipse surrounded by clouds. In reality, the danger of eye damage prohibits us from staring at a solar eclipse without eye protection. Fields’ image allows us to stare fixedly, the black disk metamorphosing into our eyes’ pupils, as in Magritte’s 1928 painting, “The False Mirror.”
Fields depicts doubled celestial bodies in “Twin Solo,” with its overlapping Venn diagram of partial eclipses, and “The World Is Not as You See It,” with its twin crescent moons, one seen from a clearing in the cloud cover, and the other seen through it. In “Whole Sky” and “A Light Hurt” the bokeh balls or lens flares beloved of photographers multiply, suggesting optical phenomena like auroras and glories, sun dogs and moon dogs, all of it spiritualized.
Fields’ paintings, with their mood of quiet absorption, are also reminiscent of the skyscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, with their rapt, enchanted viewers turning their backs on us. Fields reminds us that we are now those silent witnesses to the mystery of the universe, reminded once again that we and our culture are part of nature, not always its masters but its subjects. We are not inevitably — as the status-quo fatalists rationalize — victims of our own nature. As Shakespeare’s Cassius says in “Julius Caesar:” “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”
DeWitt Cheng is an art writer/critic based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has written for more than twenty years for regional and national publications, in print and online, He has written dozens of catalogue essays for artists, galleries and museums, and is the author of “Inside Out: The Paintings of William Harsh.” In addition, he served as the curator at Stanford Art Spaces from 2013 to 2016, and later Peninsula Museum of Art, from 2017 to 2020.
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