Dead Trees in Ohio: Mark Common: Oil Paintings, at ArtiCle

Mark Common paints landscapes almost exclusively, and he says in a statement on the wall  at ArtiCle Gallery, “I sometimes derisively mock my work as just pretty pictures.” He adds, “on a certain level, I hope that is true.”

And in fact it is, as you can see if you check out Mark Common – Oil Paintings at Article Gallery through June 6. It’s true enough that you might wonder why you haven’t seen more of his art in more shows, including solo shows. He did one a couple of years ago at the now-defunct Lord City Gallery, but in recent years that’s been about it.

Common studied art at Kent State University and was an art teacher in the Cleveland Municipal School District for years, but then took up landscape design—from plantings to the creation of stone patios and water features.

There’s a bit of landscape design in the paintings, too: they start with real locations, but in most of them he does some editing of the scene, adding elements that weren’t there, or changing them to fit the composition. But even if they were completely imagined, the woodland scenes –such as the one called Rocky River, Metropark, wherein you can find specific indigenous tree varieties, such as maples, beeches and sycamores—uncannily evoke Ohio. It’s the leaves, the roll of the land, the lay of the water in the river or a marsh, and the ambient light. And in a painting of a railroad lift bridge across the flats, wherein the Cleveland skyline is relegated to the cloudy background, our hometown shines through not just the distinctive lines of the buildings, but in the cloudy, always-under-construction mood.

Common is really good at handling paint, especially to capture the way light behaves. A couple of these show that especially well. His American Sunset—a white farmhouse and shed dwarfed by a cumulous cloudy sky with power lines stretched across the scene—doesn’t show the sun in the sunset. It’s somewhere west of the edge of the canvas. Instead, we see its fall on one side of the clouds, which glow against the blue sky as result, while on the other side they fade to greys and near purple.

Similarly, in a painting simply called Tracks, we don’t see the source of the light: in this case, the sun’s rays are broadcast from behind a bank of clouds and a clapboard building, next to it another building with the kind of clerestory that creates space for an overhead crane. From the barrenness of the trees, it’s winter—as it seems to be in most of Common’s paintings. And the trees are more interesting that way, naked of their leaves, the shapes of their skeletons revealed. But in this painting the railroad tracks are the stars, and not just because they give the canvas its name. While they are surrounded by the shade of the building, the tracks have caught and reflected the ambient light from the sky so that they almost burn their winding path into the distance.

Even as some of these landscapes have been edited to please the artist’s eye, they’re almost exclusively realistic. One exception comes hard with the surrealist humor, though: Where Is Mark, Anyway is another landscape with a cloudy sky, in this case a beachfront which–for its churned up water and the concrete slab pier that projects out into the lake—looks like Huntington Beach in Bay Village. But the much-larger-than-life, monumentally scaled bust of the artist is dropped incongruously into the foreground, surrounded by highly unlikely bubbles, floating above, in front, and in the distance. It looks for all the world like the closing scene from the 1968 film Planet of the Apes, in which Charlton Heston discovers the wreckage of the Statue of Liberty buried in sand. “God damn you all to hell,” the character rages, pounding the sand as he has realized he was home all along, and humans had destroyed their planet in a nuclear war. Common says he didn’t mean to make the allusion and just thought it was funny.

My favorite of these is in his Dead Tree series—not one of the big paintings, and not in the front room. It’s a series of five relatively small canvases, each featuring dead trees in varying states of decay. Their titles animate or even humanize each dead tree in some way. One painting of a twisted trunk is called Sublime Agony. Another, hollowed and decayed, with mushrooms growing from it, is called Progenitor. My favorite, Conversion of Energy, includes the trunks of a dozen or so bare trees, but the focus is on one large tree, laying long dead on the ground and becoming one with it as shelf fungi grow along its length, and moss and grass overwhelm it from the top.  The grass overhangs like a shock of hair, dominating the composition, nourished by all that lies beneath.

Check it out during Walk All Over Waterloo, Friday, June 6.

Mark Common – Oil Paintings
May 2 – June 6
ArtiCle Gallery
15316 Waterloo Road
Cleveland, Ohio 44110