Carl Nelson

Carl Nelson's recent drawings and paintings at the Mirski Gallery are a delightful demonstration that contemporary art's abstract style can be a great deal more than sufferable (which it rarely is).

Nelson dribbles, splatters, dabs, and does other such things that most other abstract artists do to express their most inward thoughts--the thoughts, apparently, of blubbering babes. Yet Nelson conveys a meaning in his pictures, and a meaning far more complex than mere chaos and confusion.

His subjects are primarily landscapes in Maine--birches, pine forests, poppy fields--from which he abstracts the essence. No more, but no less. At times one somehow feels that Plato may have had a point with his "ideas" and that Nelson has come pretty close to discovering how "ideas" look.

To my taste, by far the most beautiful painting was a large canvas with a garden of 63 (Nelson counted them at the opening) poppies on a pink blotch. The colors of this are delicate pastels and each poppy looks like no more than two or three perfectly drawn strokes.

Dribbles appear where they make sense--as foam in a rough surf, or as leaves or moss on birch trees. Scratches too fit in as the birches' smaller branches and twigs. Though frequently each spot of paint is applied with a certain amount of grossness, the composite usually reveals striking unity and conveys a powerful impression.

I find Nelson less successful in his drawings, which contain something of the chichi. With a pen, his style tightens and he devolves overly intricate objects from a seemingly never-ending sinuous line.

The show, in sum, is to be highly recommended, at least as an example of one man's synthesis of traditional and modern art, at most as a collection containing a number of very beautiful paintings.