Looking at Art

Although human forms are absent in Jim Couper's painting Into The Wind, Whitewater Bay, we are nevertheless powerfully drawn into this picture. Our experience with this work is about communicating with its energy. Couper charges us with deftly applied color. Each brushstroke on the surface reverberates. He has created a painted vista that is two feet high and six feet wide and places us in the water on an imaginary boat. He reminds us that our experience in nature is about realizing its greater power.

Through his brush-stroked pigments of blue, white, green and umber, we become fascinated by the thick texture of the clouds and convinced that they are moving swiftly overhead. These we contrast with the wave pattern in front and below us that we are equally convinced is solid and opaque. Couper's painting records the transparency of space, the solidity of atmosphere, the complexity of light and the mystery of water.

Couper wants to resolve the difference between a realist reconstruction of nature in all its detail and the larger, sublime experience he provides us in his awe-inspiring view. His lushly painted surface provides an aesthetic experience not unlike the offerings of the American 19th-century landscapists of the Hudson River School. You may see the work in an exhibition of landscape painters this month at the von Liebig Art Center in Naples. -Mark Ormond

Mark Ormond is a Southwest Florida writer, art historian and independent curator.