Kottke, who appears March 30 at the Stoughton Opera House, took time to answer a few questions for Isthmus. He holds an honorary doctorate in music performance from UW-Milwaukee, where he conducts annual guitar workshops, and a “Certificate of Significant Achievement in Not Playing the Trombone” from the University of Texas at Brownsville. Kottke, now 73, picked up the guitar at age 11 after experimenting with the violin and trombone. He is primarily an instrumentalist, but has been known occasionally to sing in a voice he describes as “geese farts on a muggy day.” A child of the ‘60s folk scene, native of Athens, Georgia, and longtime Twin Cities resident, sets the bar with his finger-picking style of playing. When the narrator fades into the background, we lose a little of the overt ecological messaging, but sometimes it’s better to be shown than to be told.Kottke is one of the nation’s finest practitioners of the finger-picking style.Īccording to fans, Leo Kottke may be the world’s consummate acoustic guitarist. These paintings feel slightly off script and allow the viewer to explore the terrain on their own, dipping into each one’s compositional contingencies and material quirks. Rockman relaxes his hand and lets the watercolor do the work, flowing and pooling as naturally as the subject matter itself. Upper Peninsula, a fairly simple composition of a moose in a woodsy lake, makes great use of the aqueous medium to build the composition. The work is eccentric yet meditative-from lake bottom to the winding green aurora at top.
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Ice Fishing’s composition recalls the famous poster for the movie Jaws, only the figure on top of the waterline is an ice fisher, and the submerged life is native fish. Two in particular, Ice Fishing and Upper Peninsula, strike a fine balance between field study detachment and artistic eccentricity. In other words, the more we see of the work, sometimes, the more we see of the artist, and the more we see of the artist, the more we notice the wizard than his spell.įive 72-by-54-inch framed watercolor and acrylic paintings rediscover some of the mystery and ambiguity lost in the Cycle paintings. Someone once said that Goodfellas was a movie that looked like it simply happened, until Casino made it look like it was made. It’s a hazard of the job that Thomas Cole must have thought about when he painted the Course of Empire. This is partially due to the nature of the project, to be sure, but nevertheless, it figures into how they’re received. The scale, messaging and extravagance provides a kind of tent-pole quality the storylines change slightly, but the structure and process don’t. They are truly cinematic, but the returns tend to diminish from work to work.
Walking toward the 12-by-five-foot panoramic paintings in the gallery is a powerful, verging on destabilizing, experience. Rockman’s signature compositional division above and below a waterline reveals native fish, boat wrecks and other debris lurking underneath the forsaken terrestrial landscape, without hardly a square foot of real estate, wet or dry, abstaining from the opportunity to tell us how bleak the ecological situation is.
It’s truly an ensemble performance, though, with glaciers, plumes of smoke, beetles and flocks of birds joining in. The work features charging caribou in the foreground gliding through crowded waters toward cut logs and rusty tanker ships in the future at stage right. The painting doesn’t have a clear focal point, so left-to-right, like the printed word, wins out. The painting Cascade is a firehose of visual information, offering a historical synopsis of extracted Great Lakes resources from the Ice Age through the industrialized present.
We know what everything is about in a general sense pretty quickly the remaining urge then is to sort out the themes of each painting, and the particular references within, an exercise in symbolic taxonomy that is satisfying, if not transformative. They are as didactically ecological as Giotto di Bondone’s Arena Chapel fresco was didactically biblical.Ĭommissioned originally by the Grand Rapids Museum of Art, Rockman’s cycle confronts threats to the Great Lakes through monumental narratives, painted with a purposive clarity. New York-based painter Alexis Rockman’s Great Lakes Cycle, currently on view at the Haggerty Museum of Art through May 19, dispenses with any polite ambiguity on the way to his dramatic, cautionary message about the health of the Great Lakes ecosystem.
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