A 20-year retrospective of Dale Livezey's oil paintings was shown
at the Holter Museum of Art
in Helena, Montana in January and February 2001.
The following is an essay by noted writer Rick Newby about the work.
"At dusk, things take on a light-life / of their own: greens glow, whites / shine, browns grow black . . ." writes poet Eamon Grennan.
Montana painter Dale Livezey is a poet of dusk and of daybreak. He has always been drawn to the swiftly changing light, the intensities of color, that come at sunset (and at dawn). He nurtures an obsession with the play of shadow in folds of landscape (in the depths of gullies, at the verge of forests, along unruly clusters of willows)—and he delights in the moody changeability of these magic times between night and day. There is a contemplative, almost prayerful quality to Livezey's dramatic and serene evocations of real (and wholly imagined) places at their most striking.
These landscapes (for nearly all of Livezey's production is landscape, with the occasional still life and rare portrait) capture western hillsides and mountain slopes, deep forest and sweep of open country, creeks and high lakes, coulees and river valleys, and the ever-present vastness of the Montana sky. They speak of place, but even more of perception—and of perception attached to feeling. They are, in the best sense, emotional landscapes; they call up—through an alchemy of pigment, compositional rightness, and painterly skill—emotions that reside in every beholder.
Almost entirely self-taught, Dale Livezey has schooled himself in the western landscape, immersing his vision in both the sharply etched beauties of the Rocky Mountain Front (at the ravishing margin between mountain and prairie) and in the more modest pleasures of central Montana, where tablelands afford the greatest drama and a simple coulee can hold your eye for hours.
But Livezey has also taken as his principal teachers two American artists, Maynard Dixon and Wolf Kahn, a pair of painters—mavericks like Livezey—who internalized the lessons of modernism while never rejecting the rendering, however simplified and intensified, of the visible world of landscape. In Dixon, Livezey discovered a painter of nearly Cubist landscapes who felt powerfully that the West "is spiritually important to America." And in Kahn, he found a daring colorist who, in the words of art historian Meyer Schapiro, "makes the abstraction and the representation at the same time."
Following his mentors' leads, Dale Livezey has turned away from the conventional rendering of a detailed realism in favor of a dynamic and simplified vocabulary of planes and cubic forms (in the mode of Dixon) and a palette that sometimes stretches into heightened, "untrue" colors that express a truer reality (as with Wolf Kahn).
Working exclusively in oils (except for the rare block print), Livezey does not use a swift expressionist brush seeking an effect of spontaneity; rather he prefers to work slowly, searching through many sessions—wet paint applied to dry—to achieve a surface enlivened and deepened by highly charged layers of underpainting.
This approach, developed over nearly thirty years, enables Livezey to create paintings that are emotionally and spiritually resonant, somehow right, even when they depict places that exist only in the painter's imagination (a surprising number of Livezey's landscapes cannot be found in the real world).
Montana fiction writer Peter Fromm, the covers of whose books are often graced by Livezey paintings, says of this feeling of rightness in the artist's work: "Often times I'll work for weeks, months, just trying to fix a story in a place, a very particular place—nothing that blows your ideas of landscape out the door, just something so everyday that it takes a second glance to realize its incredible beauty. Then I'll happen upon one of Dale's paintings and realize that the place has been there all along, perfectly realized on his canvases. He does it to me every time."
A. B. Guthrie's The Big Sky is a landmark in the literature of westward expansion, and Guthrie's phrase still resonates with many westerners. It is no accident then that, when the 1947 novel was reissued in 1992, the publishers chose a Dale Livezey sky painting, Evening Glow, as the appropriate cover image. And when the collection of literary essays, Writing Montana, was published in 1996, it is small wonder that the Montana Center for the Book selected a Livezey landscape, Ridge over Smith Creek, for the cover, as clearly embodying "the endurance, the realism, the various forms of terse eloquence" that characterize, in the words of critic William Bevis, the best of Montana literature.
The fruit of deep commitment by an artist for whom the act of painting landscape is a spiritual practice, the paintings in Open Country call forth our dreams and our memories—of landscapes we have loved or imagined we might. This exhibition proves Dale Livezey to be a singular painter of the American West, a true voice of this spiritually important place.
—Rick Newby, Helena, Montana
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