David Dewey’s exhibition of large watercolors, at the Bernarducci Meisel Gallery in New York City in June, signaled an important contribution to an American tradition that explores the visual possibilities of the northeast coast. Clearly an admirer of Luminist painter John Frederick Kensett (1816–72), Dewey often paints in and around Newport, Rhode Island, a favorite Kensett locale, and is a master of atmospheric color. Dewey’s serene edge-of-the water views have an expansive sweep, and like the Luminists, he dispenses with framing devices such as the Claudean coulisse. At the same time, he has learned the lessons of twentieth-century modernists such as Mark Rothko, as in the horizontal bands of featureless color in one of his more austere images, Sky and Sea: Daybreak (2005). His deep contemplation of the infinite simplicity of this perennial subject also suggests the absorbing photographs of Hiroshi Sugimoto. Dewey sometimes acknowledges human presence explicitly, for example in beach buildings, a paved road or the tiny craft of Sole Mooring (2004), which hovers on the surface of a rainbow sea beneath a rose sky, like an observer at the edge of a mist-shrouded abyss in a Caspar David Friedrich painting.
 

Dewey, who has been exhibiting since the mid-1970s, started as a plein-air painter, but now works in the studio, relying on memory and preparatory studies for his highly distilled images. The locations he selects are inhabited, even domesticated, but no figures appear. Day’s End (2005) is unusual in focusing on a dead-on-straight view of a white wood house that nearly fills the picture frame. Nature seems excluded, and yet the light is still there, dividing the sunlit upper half of the façade from the shadow below and reflecting in two of the upper-register windows. The sense of loneliness suggests Edward Hopper, but the geometry seems almost Platonic. More characteristic is Sachuest Beach (2003). Dewey arranges a number of classic shorescape incidents—tufts of grass, a sandy spit, the white curl of a wave, a boat moored almost out of sight behind a dune—in a striking formal composition. The lower third of the image is carved into bold shapes by a combination of straight and curved lines, while the upper section melts into ombre-shaded sky. Dewey’s skies are typically undisturbed by clouds; it’s one of the aspects of his work that moves it towards abstraction. The way the artist achieves a poise between abstraction and representation is exemplified by Winter Harbor (2005), a large watercolor (36 7/8×57 inches) where the horizon line swelling into a low headland gives us just enough topographical information to orient us. There are no signs of commercial or recreational activity. The formal drama centers on the way the relatively opaque layer of blue water at the bottom plays against the diaphanous veils of the sky. Abstraction tends to isolate color from the prismatic effects of phenomenal light. Dewey never lets us forget that the sky color in Winter Harbor—an almost greenish blue descending to bruised peach at the horizon line—is saturated light. Dewey’s work appears in numerous public and private collections, including the Newport Art Museum, the Frye Art Museum and the Portland Museum of Art. Bernarducci Meisel Gallery, 37 West 57th Street, New York, New York 10019. Telephone (212) 593-3757. bernarduccimeisel.com 

Originally printed in American Arts Quarterly, Volume 22, number 3.