Artwork of the 80's
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Artists & Works

April Gornik
American (b. 1954)
RIVER BEFORE TWILIGHT
(1987)
charcoal and pastel on paper
41.5" x 53.5"

STYLE: landscape

 ©April Gornik

April Gornik's paintings assert the power of landscape in ways similar to the American painters of the 19th century. But instead of documenting surrounding wonders, Gornik's landscapes owe as much to her own interior perspective as they do to any exterior vista. It may seem irrelevant to paint serenely lit uninhabited spaces in this age of urbanization and technological advancement—such spaces are becoming ever rarer and less relevant to the dominant culture except as nostalgic fantasies. However, Gornik's attitude towards painting these half imaginary, half representative scenes is that of the wistful interpreter. She combines the heritage of Romantic landscape painting with her own idealized mysterious vision. Significantly, unlike the 19th century works, Gornik does not include the human figure.

River before Twilight features the hovering clouds, pools of water, and geometric arrangements of space that characterize much of Gornik's work. It is an experience of landscape rather than a particular slice of observed nature. Gornik has said that her painting is influenced by the books she reads, the music she listens to (especially opera), and her own experiments with gardening.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

John Yau, ARTFORUM, 1/90
"April Gornick has stuck to the initial attitudes toward both content and style she developed when she first began exhibiting regularly in the early 80s...For the past decade, Gornick has depicted open vistas seen from a distance and veiled in diaphanous light...the balanced compositions evoke an overall serenity—an emotional sameness—that now seems more a habitual attitude than a discovered "actuality" of these imagined places...For all her supposed celebration of the visionary, Gornick handles paint in a manner that is too parsimonious to produce anything more than frail, nostalgic restatements of well-worn motifs...an innocent nostalgia for the theatrical views of the Hudson River School."

Nancy Grimes, ARTnews, 1/88
"April Gornick's landscapes are often linked to the Hudson River School, but size is the only similarity. The 19th century landscapists believed that nature was imbued with spiritual power and that, by faithfully recording it in minute detail, the artist could commune with God. But Gornick's feathery expanses of sky and inert fragments of land are decidedly unnaturalistic, and more infused with mood than spirit...Gornick fills her large pictures with strips of grass, trees, and lakes that lie passively beneath shoals of skittering clouds. These empty, static vistas are often punctuated by dramatic flashes of reflected light and strange, ominously darkening cloud formations...Gornick offsets the implacable blandness of the land with an engaging tenseness—nothing is happening with her vacant pastorales, but something might...While the mysterious and marvelous are often to be found in natural landscape, Gornick's pregnant pauses seem more concocted than observed...Her spatial and lighting devices are conventional to the point of cliché, her shapes flat and flimsy, her paint application limp and monotonous. The paintings deliberate artificiality and ambiguous sense of scale (how much space would a human figure occupy in a Gornick landscape?), as well as their carefully cultivated mysteriousness, suggest that the artist's territory is symbolist rather than realist. The paintings have curiously little to do with their intended subject matter. Moodily psychological, the paintings manipulate the traditional association of the land with the female body, and thus become something that approaches self-portraiture."

Michael Kimmelman, NYTimes, 4/28/89
"..in April Gornick's ''One'' (1986), a seascape where light breaks through dark, low-lying clouds, a visitor can sense most clearly admiration for Romantic painters like Caspar David Friedrich - a reverence that Susan Lubowsky, the exhibition's organizer, rightly pinpoints as a distinguishing trait among contemporary American landscapists."