Art: Sunny Fragrance

Since the fad images of today are the square, the splotch and the soup can, it may seem that the only painters working with landscape are those daubing billboards to hide it. One who does not think that landscapes are old-fashioned is Jane Wilson, 39, a slim, chic former fashion mannequin who is personally as modern and vivacious as a girl in a Pepsi-Cola ad. Her recent landscapes and even newer cityscapes, which went on display last week at Manhattan’s Tibor de Nagy Gallery, are suffused with such sunny fragrance that the New York Times’s hard-headed critic, John Canaday, went all soft trying to find an adjective with which to praise them (he said “sweet,” but quickly apologized).

There is nothing saccharine about Jane Wilson. Daughter of a farmer-civil engineer, she was raised in the cornfields of Iowa amongst sturdy Midwestern virtues as high as her eye. She went to a two-room schoolhouse with one room closed for lack of students. In high school and college bands she played the oboe and the bagpipe. From the State University of Iowa, she got a B.A. in art, an M.A. in oil painting, and a Phi Beta Kappa key. There, too, she married Composer John Gruen, now an art and music critic for the New York Herald Tribune. They have one crayon-crazy daughter, aged four.

Though she follows nature, Wilson cannot paint in front of it, commits its contours to memory. She needs recollection in tranquillity. “When I’m out in the country, I’m overwhelmed by it,” she says, and so she tackles her oils indoors. To get overwhelmed, she frequently goes to a carriage house amidst the potato fields on the seaside flats of Long Island: “I love the light out there, not just the sunny days, but also the luminous fogs.”

She paints with freewheeling, impetuous brush strokes. Yet her stimulus stems from what she sees. “It’s a quality of color that leads me into the painting,” says she. “I start with the sky and everything seems to develop out of it.” Her skies are rarely blue. Especially in her city scenes, they are overcast; always they are suffused with a pattern of sweeping bright pastels that progress in orderly fashion through a hesitant horizon down into the richer-hued grounds. Her canvases are generally square, giving the illusion of more loft of sky than breadth of horizon.

Though her oils sparkle with the French impressionists’ gay, effervescent color, she does not share their brief encounter with wind and weather. Instead, she sets down a gossamer tapestry of nature that, though fragile and even frivolous, appears timeless. Sunshine unabashedly pours from the clouds; foliage and fogs spring lively to the breeze that sweeps a meadow.