LOOK UP: Skyscapes by Berta Burr
The Left Bank Gallery • North Bennington, VT • leftbankcalendar.org • Through January 31, 2023
In this noise-infested world, it is a balm to come upon Berta Burr’s serene series of sky portraits at Left Bank Gallery. This writer must disclose that he is a sucker for clouds, and did not find it hard to feel an affinity with the 26 paintings of varying sizes, some intimate (8 x 10″), and some expansive (30 x 40″). It also helps that Left Bank, as managed by artist Rhonda Ratray, is a perfect venue for a show of this scale as it is set in a former 19th-century bank with aged wood floors, direct lighting, large windows, and is a single space venue. From one point in the room, it seemed as if there were broken points of sky poking in, dropping tumbling bits of cotton.
Burr views the world “with a degree of detachment that allows for the possibility of beauty,” though I did not detect aloofness here. Burr’s eye is present, as is her hand, in the compositional choices and the modes of pigment application. What is there, for certain, is the beauty. The strength is in how she builds tension between the amorphous clouds, modeled, sculpted, and rendered as poetic beings set against the various shades of blue or crepuscular light: cerulean, azure, sapphire, arctic, or mustard, lilac, mango. Each view is a snapshot of a meteorological moment, a nod to Constable, and a gesture of respect for a part of the world under which we exist yet are often too frantic to notice. Burr’s imperative is that we “Look Up,” and when we do, as with her paintings, we will be pleasantly surprised, if not blessed.
The paintings are all untitled, allowing for freedom of interpretation, of self-labeling, of Wordsworthian immersion. Who does not want to wander within each of these windows? Clouds are merely water vapors, ice crystals, yet Burr sees beyond the scientific into the poetic. In Untitled 14, a flurry of darkened petals flows outward, a scumble of pigments, in a blue frame. In Untitled 15, Burr has arranged a combination of cirrus and stratus in a somber sky. The light play in each wisp indicates the emotional levels these heavens can assume.
This show connects to Constable, Debussy, and the Tang landscape painters, as it gives us a moment of peace, of magic, and of music, which amble on above, in a gentle and wise silence.
—Bret Chenkin