To understand Joellyn Duesberry’s painting today, it’s important to travel back in time to 1981, when she completed a quiet oil on linen titled “Pond in an Orchard, NY.”
Since that work, the oldest selection on view in an ambitious survey running through June 27 at the Museum of Outdoor Arts, her style has evolved in some dramatic and unexpected ways.
That early painting is sedate, studied and even understated, adjectives that would never be applied to her more recent works, such as the sharply contrasting oil on linen hanging to its left, “The Pedernales River, TX” (2005).
Her present style is looser with brighter, more pronounced colors and rhythmic compositional structure, often in a circular or vertical configuration.
Although Duesberry at least starts most of her works outdoors at the site of whatever she is painting, there is an overt sense of her imposing her artistic will on her subject matter — reality interpreted.
A characteristic example is a sweeping 40-by-120-inch diptych, titled “Hogback Entry Into Roxborough Park, CO” (2007).
A kind of soft, undulating compositional motif runs through this painting, from the rounded contours of the terrain to the wispy clouds to the oddly curved branches of the trees, and is interrupted only by the sharp edges of the jutting rocks at the right.
Like virtually all Duesberry’s works, the sky is barely visible. Instead, for reasons that are unclear, she zeroes in on the land and everything below, placing the horizon line very high.
In all, about 50 paintings and studies are on view in this ambitious exhibition, depicting a surprisingly wide range of locales from parts of Colorado to Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., to Nimes, France, to Tuscany, Italy.
The show gives viewers a chance to really delve into the work of this well-respected artist, who divides her time between studios in Denver and Millbrook, N.Y.
In 2006, Duesberry’s work was showcased in a survey exhibition shown at the Century Association in New York City and Smith College Center in Northampton, Mass., and she was the subject of a 2004 documentary broadcast on public television.
A beautiful, technically adept work, such as “Cove by the Pool, Big Cranberry Island, ME” (2007), with its circular compositional structure and extended depth of field, makes such attention understandable.
(It is shown along with several other works in the museum’s new sound gallery, with high- tech audio equipment providing soothing music and sound effects. The question, of course, is whether such accoutrements enhance or, as I suspect, detract from the art.)
What is surprising, though, are some of the misses that accompany the hits. In her paintings of the desert Southwest and West, for example, Duesberry has a peculiar tendency to overload depictions of what is ultimately a spacious, open landscape, as seen in the works of Georgia O’Keeffe and others.
She takes this propensity too far in “Colorado Riverbank, II, UT” (2007), overpacking the foreground to the exclusion of almost everything else and creating a overcrowded composition that gives the eye no place to focus.
The exhibition’s nadir is Duesberry’s embarrassing “Memory Time Lapse: Ground Zero, NY” (2003), a melodramatic, overwrought composite view of the Sept. 11 destruction and early cleanup efforts that comes off as more of a caricature than anything meaningful or emotionally resonant.
But such missteps are the exceptions in what is overall a welcome look at a strong, accomplished Colorado artist.
Kyle MacMillan: 303-954-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com
“Joellyn Duesberry: The Big Picture”
Art Museum of Outdoor Arts, Englewood Civic Center, 1000 Englewood Parkway. A 25-year survey of paintings and studies by noted Colorado artist Joellyn Duesberry. Through June 27. 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays through Fridays and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays. Free. 303-806-0444 or .
