Santa Fe, NM – LewAllen Galleries’ upcoming exhibition, Botanica, will feature new paintings and works on paper representing an exciting level of innovation by the legendary Santa Fe artist John Fincher. He is best known for signature use of luminescent color and close-up perspective that has long served to valorize details of ordinary cactus pads, poplar trees, limbs and branches, and billowing clouds – what he calls his “trappings of the West.”
In this new body of work, Botanica, John Fincher inaugurates largely unexplored image choice and innovative composition, creating an entirely new series of striking paintings based on floral and plant motifs that represents a significant departure from the pictorial vocabulary of his previous and more familiar Southwestern paintings. The Botanica series includes more than thirty oils on linen and works on paper, and takes the artist’s previous love of flora and propels it to an entirely new level of contemporary vitality.
With these new works, Fincher engages the tradition of botanical art that dates back 4,500 years to China, and over 1,700 years ago the eastern Mediterranean and ancient Egypt. These cultures used botanical drawing to preserve knowledge and adorn the walls of tombs. This history also includes the sumptuous masterworks of the genre’s legendary practitioners including Leonardo da Vinci, Albrecht Dürer, Jan Brueghel the Elder, Pierre-Joseph Redouté, among others. Though Fincher’s interpretation rivals the finest of these in terms of striking visual beauty, his new works possess a radically different sense of contemporary presence.
Unlike the tradition’s typical formality and nearly exclusive use of exotic or ornamental floral subject, Fincher’s botanical works subtly combine both the elegance of fancy flower blossoms with the unexpected simplicity of desiccated seed pods, thistles and twigs. Fincher composes his paintings from cascading blossoms and pods floating randomly on subtle backgrounds of sky and water.
The colors and painting style are as sumptuous as the best florilegia of the 17th century but the overall result evinces a thoroughly modern dash of surreal quirk. And by placing the ordinary side-by-side with the more elegant, Fincher creates art that implies a similar populist nobility attained in his more familiar work. In a broad sense, the work also achieves added contemporary relevance by demonstrating compelling relationships between the artist and the environment and inspires close attention to the beauty and mystery our own natural surroundings.
The new series possesses an enthralling beauty borne less of the subject matter itself and more of Fincher’s unique way of seeing it. His work has always been distinguished by an uncanny ability to transform his highly individual vision of whatever subject he chooses to paint into engaging visual experience. The attainment of beauty in his work has largely been accomplished through indirection rather than self-consciously.
Born in Hamilton, Texas, in 1941, John Fincher earned his MFA from University of Oklahoma in 1966. The artist’s works have been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions and have been represented in important group exhibitions at such significant venues as SITE Santa Fe, the Aspen Art Museum, and the National Art Museum of China, Beijing. His work resides in major public institutions including the Smithsonian Institution, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Wichita Art Museum, and the Albuquerque Museum of Art & History. A major eponymously entitled monograph on Fincher and his career was published by Radius Books in 2012.
