Subtle Switches: "Nancy Feldkamp, Watercolors” at Kerrytown Concert House

REVIEW VISUAL ART

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Nancy Feldkamp's Simplicity House, mixed media. Photo by Patrick Young.

Sometimes what you see in an artist's work isn’t nearly as important as what you don’t see. Nancy Feldkamp’s Watercolors at the Kerrytown Concert House shows the Chelsea resident's transformation from a geometrically focused painter to one who uses subtle inferences to give shape to her renderings.

As ever, her pastoral themes remain, as Feldkamp modestly says in her KCH gallery statement: “My work honors the beauty of farm life and its interaction with nature in intuitive ways. The shapes and lines suggest distant farmsteads as they nestle together in their actual settings and this stirs my responses.”

Quite right, yet looking at Feldkamp’s work in this light only tells half the story in this show. While nature and rural settings still play a significant role in her paintings, how she depicts those scenes has changed considerably during the two decades I've observed her output. Back in the 1990s, Feldkamp’s art was rigorously geometrically driven. Her countryside settings were activated by a compositional style whose expression was subordinated to her rectilinear line.

And it’s this literal trace -- or, more accurately, its near disappearance -- that’s readily apparent in her current exhibition because Feldkamp’s prior work had a remarkable geometric purity that resembled a sort of hard-edged Precisionist integrity, thereby making each artwork a unique interpretation of spatial depth.

These more current farmland studies at the Kerrytown Concert House are far looser in their articulation. The geometry is still there, of course, but rather than dominate, it now serves as a transitional compositional spine that abstractly traces itself across these paintings and mixed media works.

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Nancy Feldkamp's Tree Farm, watercolor painting. Photo by Patrick Young.

For example, her watercolor Tree Farm is clearly a transitional work where Feldkamp uses her line to abet a flattened articulation that’s more decorative landscape than a literal rendering. Indeed, it’s the very nature of her rectilinear geometry that holds the painting together. There’s a farm and a field -- with trees and surrounding environs -- but it’s pure straight-lined suggestion.

Using a different strategy, Feldkamp’s Boundary House features a far more subtle geometry with five horizontal lines fronted by more than a dozen receding diagonal lines depicting a plowed field leading to a cluster of houses in the painting’s recessed interior. These houses, depicted as being no more than an abstracted outline, are nestled in a way that allows Feldkamp’s rich and loosely applied earth-tone-watercolor washes in the foreground to dominate the painting’s background.

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Nancy Feldkamp's Boundary House, watercolor painting. Photo by Patrick Young.

Boundary House is an expert balance of abstract representation and precise symmetrical heart. The loosened foreground articulation finds Feldkamp working in the opposite manner of her prior art. Her older paintings placed a premium on sharply articulated boundaries, but these paintings flow chromatically, allowing us to see the essence between her lines. What we don’t see is as equally important as what we do see.

This tendency of addition by subtraction is even more pronounced in the three mixed media artworks in the Kerrytown exhibit. In these constructions, Feldkamp has essentially loosened her visual mooring until her geometric line is only inferred. As such, the collective strength of these works lies in the absence of a formalized exterior that previously held her work together.

Feldkamp’s mixed media Simplicity House is a prime example of this strategy. This mixed media work is composed of broadsheet patches that consist of newsprint and other overlaid paper. The composition’s loosened articulation of space allows these rough-edged papers to play against one another. Yet true to form, Feldkamp has added streaks of watercolor lines that faintly craft an outline and structure the house’s contour.

Feldkamp generally now uses her watercolor to craft internal recession, and in the instance of Simplicity House, she applies only the loosest of facture -- in fact, quite nearly nothing more than an abstract wash -- to suggest her form. Feldkamp has now nearly lost her anchor in representation, and while her reliance on geometry was never a crutch, this relaxation results in liberating gestures.

Seeing Feldkamp’s newer work for the first time in some half-dozen years is certainly a treat. Perhaps if we’re lucky -- given the length of time between her exhibits -- we’ll get a retrospective in the future to allow us to study the transitions I’ve described in these recent works. At the least, Feldkamp’s one of those lucky artists -- who perhaps like a good architect -- has been able to modify her approach without losing sight of her favored motifs.


John Carlos Cantú has written on our community's visual arts in a number of different periodicals.


Kerrytown Concert House's “Nancy Feldkamp, Watercolors” runs through February 27, 2017. The Kerrytown Concert House is located at 415 N. Fourth St. Exhibit hours 10 am to 4 pm, Monday-Friday. For information, call 734-769-2999.