illuminating ideas
on landscape:
Clyde Aspevig
Painting with his eyes and mind wide open
By Susan Ewing
o matter what you
pay for it, you can never
really own a painting by
Clyde Aspevig. It owns itself.
You just give it space to settle,
and muse, and reveal its deeper ideas over time.
Ideas—about memory, music, light, truth, the relationship between
humans and nature, the fate of the earth—give Aspevig’s remarkable landscapes their heart, soul, and innate intelligence. In the beginning there is an
idea; a concept, an observation, a question.
“Then,” says Aspevig, “you take all the tools you have, and skills
you’ve acquired, and you apply those to the idea—and then you drive
yourself crazy.”
Aspevig has been driving himself crazy, exploring and pushing the
parameters of landscape art, for the major share of his 56 years. Even as a
boy, he was struck by the beauty of thunderclouds and purple horizons, the
texture of lichen on rock, and the play of light in coulees around the family
farm near Rudyard, on Montana’s Hi-Line. He made his first art sale to his
father when he was 12, and has been driven by a passion to understand,
experience, and celebrate the land through painting ever since.
Aspevig enrolled in Eastern Montana College (now Montana State
University—Billings) in the early 1970s, when many art instructors
were pushing students into abstract work, decreeing that landscape
painting “had already been done.” Fortunately his art instructor there,
Ben Steele, not only allowed but encouraged the aspiring student to
stick with landscape.
J UNIPERS
AND
C LOUDS
2007
oil on canvas
20” x 24”
118
The absence of an animate presence in the scene subtly welcomes the viewer to see the land itself
as a living being, instead of a mere backdrop.
“He knew the direction he wanted to go and he kept
going,” recalls Steele. “Even now he just keeps getting better.
He strives for that. He’ll go down as one of the best.”
Steele grounded him in the fundamentals of art, but
beyond that, Aspevig’s astute grasp of everything from art, to
nature, to politics has come from a tenacious inner hunger for
knowledge and huge appetite for work.
Aspevig paid part of his way through college selling
watercolors, which he showed at local banks. After graduating
with a degree in education, he got a job teaching high school
art in Oregon, but Montana and his true life’s work soon
called him back. By the 1980s, he had established a national
reputation. His first one-man exhibition was in 1980 at the
Thomas Nygard Gallery in Bozeman, followed over the years
by nearly 20 more, including exhibits at such distinguished
venues as the Rockwell Museum of Western Art, Nordic
Heritage Museum, and Museum of the Rockies. Aspevig has
been awarded nearly two dozen awards and honors over his
career, the most recent being the prestigious 2007 Masters of
the American West Purchase Award, presented at the Autry
G LACIER N ATIONAL P ARK
CHOKECHERRY
R AIN
2007
oil on canvas
40” x 60 ”
2006
oil on canvas
30” x 24”
120
Big Sky Journal 121
Much of Aspevig’s current work follows
the path blazed by artists of the
Impressionistic Movement.
National Center in Los Angeles.
Attorney Pete Mettler, who has collected a number of
Aspevig’s paintings, appreciates the consistent high quality of
the work, saying Aspevig “strives for perfection.” Yet it’s not
a tedious perfection for perfection’s own sake, it’s the longwearing excellence of getting things right. Mettler doesn’t
hesitate in declaring Aspevig to be the best western landscape
artist in the country. He is obviously not the only collector to
think so, as Aspevig’s paintings sell before he even gets the
finish coat of varnish on them.
Recognition and financial reward are nice, but that’s not
why he does it. Aspevig paints from a very personal need to
be fully engaged in the landscape and the earth; to probe his
own emotions, discover the sublime, and because he just can’t
help himself.
“He told me one day that he’s kind of addicted to painting,” laughs Steele, who himself is still painting at nearly 90
years old.
Naturally enough, Aspevig’s paintings begin in partnership with his other addiction, being outdoors. Field studies,
smallish plein air works painted quickly on canvas or board,
are at the heart of each larger painting developed layer
by layer in his spacious studio north of Clyde Park, Mont.
Aspevig likens his extensive collection of field studies, which
he stores in long cubbies like a vinyl record collection, to his
personal journal. He doesn’t keep a written diary, but says the
studies serve as an emotive visual record.
“I can tell you what was happening on that day, who I
was with, what the weather was like,” he says, pulling out
study after study: a camp in the California redwoods, a Wind
River pack trip, a Katahdin Lake canoe expedition, a winter
day in Sweden, and on.
M ARIAS
RIVER
2006
oil on canvas
20” x 30”
122
Big Sky Journal 123
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Along with capturing the feeling of a place, the studies
summarize the relationships and harmonies between color,
form, and movement, as well as the discrete components of
the scene—rock, water, sky, vegetation, light. Back in the studio, Aspevig reconstitutes that summary in accordance with
his own interpretation, something like musicians do when
they create a unique arrangement of a jazz standard. In fact,
the artist’s ideas on music—rhythm, repetition, syncopation,
and the variation of notes—frequently come into play in
his landscapes. When articulating an edge, like where treetops meet background, he often thinks of musical notation:
whole, quarter, sixteenth notes; staccatos, slurs, glissandos,
rests; piano, forte. These musical edges often don’t exactly
match photographic edges of the same scene, because he’s
more interested in finding universal truths than in reporting
facts—like the way a novel can sometimes be more honest
than a work of nonfiction.
He points to the recently finished Junipers and Clouds,
hanging among a dozen other paintings in the bright studio, where the scent of oil paints is heavy. “All the different
qualities I’ve seen in 3 million juniper trees I’m trying to put
into one,” he says. “You have to rely on your experience and
intuition.”
Aspevig uses a camera in the field to record certain
detail, but to simply copy the information from film to canvas
doesn’t fulfill his need for discovery and his desire for intellectual exploration.
Obviously his work is representational, but the interesting part of that question is, representative of what? You could
say his recent painting “Tranquility” is about trees and sky
and the feeling of a tranquil day in nature. And you’d be right.
That’s the first layer of understanding. If you look further, you
might discover it’s also about the compositional relationship
between the field in the background and patch of scuffed
earth in the foreground, and about how trees share certain
colors with the sky. Falling deeper into the painting you might
see the artist’s contemplation on the way the texture and
shape of a tree is similar to that of a human lung.
“People can say, ‘Well, it doesn’t look like a lung to me,’”
Aspevig shrugs congenially. He’s perfectly happy for viewers
to simply appreciate the beauty of the scene. “But,” he reflects,
“having an idea like that in mind makes the way you paint
something more profound.”
Aspevig’s ideas come to him naturally, from a boyhood
balanced by farm labor and weekly classical piano lessons in
Havre, through an adulthood of working assiduously, reading
broadly, and hiking the land from Hill County, Mont., to the
hills of Tuscany with his eyes and mind wide open.
“I love empirical truth,” he says—that species of truth
derived from personal observation and guided by experience.
His love of empirical truth does not at all contradict the way
in which he breaks physical reality down into its component
visual, emotional, and sensate parts.
Chokecherry Rain, painted near the Shields Valley home
he shares with his wife, painter Carol Guzman, synthesizes
color and abstract form to create symbols from which a parallel reality resurfaces. The chokecherry bushes are impasto
piles of paint, not branches and leaves; the rain consists of
multi-hued pulls of a broad-tipped brush; and the sagebrush
is a dab of color. Yet the overall visual impact ignites the other
senses in a very real way—you can conjure the slight ozone
smell of the rain, the sharp scent of chokecherry leaves, and
the rich dampness of earth. You can feel the breeze preceding
the coming squall, and hear low, rolling thunder.
“You come up with your own sense of reality,” says
Aspevig, “and if you really believe in it, and paint it that way,
it becomes that much more powerful.”
Thomas Buechner, a trustee of the Rockwell Museum of
Western Art, has called Aspevig a “sophisticated, intellectual
idealist who also happens to paint extremely well.” Years ago,
Buechner took a plein air workshop from Aspevig and was
impressed by the way, even in the field, Aspevig took time
to carefully think things through and decide what to do next,
even with the sun beating down and minutes rushing by.
Paradoxically, a significant aspect of Aspevig’s western
landscapes is what’s not in them. For one thing, they generally don’t contain animals or people because, explains the
artist, then that’s what they become about. He nods toward
the recently finished Glacier National Park hanging on (more
like shining from) the studio wall.
“Every time I go to Deadhorse Point, I see a bear. But to
paint one there would be saying, ‘Here’s what I want you to
look at.’ The whole idea is, you know there are bears and deer
and elk in there.”
The absence of an animate presence in the scene subtly
welcomes the viewer to see the land itself as a living being,
instead of a mere backdrop. It makes more room for the
viewer’s own occupation.
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Aspevig says that when he paints, he’s virtually walking through the landscape like he’s on a hike,
going over one hill then up the next, or following the bend in a river,
or heading across the prairie toward the horizon.
In that same painting, the partial obscuring of Gunsight
Pass in the far distance also illustrates how leaving things
out can more deeply engage the viewer. After reading the
musical line down the mountaintops, instead of coasting off
the edge of the painting, the tree rechannels your momentum
and yearning to see more. The composition keeps you in the
painting by guiding your eye down through the dense stand
of trees, back into the lake, and over to the sunny shoreline
across the way.
Another element that exists in Aspevig’s paintings as
surely and invisibly as the rest of Gunsight Pass or the bear
at Deadhorse Point, is the artist’s own boot-track across the
scene. He says that when he paints, he’s virtually walking
through the landscape like he’s on a hike, going over one hill
then up the next, or following the bend in a river, or heading
across the prairie toward the horizon. Accordingly, he changes
value and color, temperature, edges, and shapes to create
two-dimensional traces that the human mind deepens and
expands into fuller emotional and intellectual dimensions.
Much of Aspevig’s current work follows the path blazed
by artists of the Impressionistic Movement. “Their greatest
contribution was the idea that you can represent light through
color,” says Aspevig. “How you interpret light is one of the
most fundamental things about painting landscape.” To get
more light, more color, more ideas into his paintings, Aspevig
primarily uses a prismatic palette; that is, the colors thrown
off by light through a prism. In paintings such as Morning at
Fallen Leaf Lake and Winter Junipers, light-as-color illuminates the canvas and defines the forms.
Ironically for a landscape artist, Aspevig uses very few
earth colors, because in reality, the earth isn’t brown just like
the sky isn’t blue. It fits, once you understand the optics of
reflected light, which is how the eye really sees.
“The sky is not a solid eggshell,” explains Aspevig. “It’s
light refracting off all those molecules and particulates in the
air. When you stare at it, it seems to vibrate.” He refers again
to “Junipers and Clouds,” saying, “That’s one reason it made
sense to paint this sky in a pointillistic style.” Pointillism
refers to the practice of using distinct dabs of primary colors to create an impression of blended secondary colors in
the eyes and mind of the observer—a favored technique of
Neo-Impressionists like Georges-Pierre Seurat. Aspevig has
great appreciation for, and keen understanding of, art history, as evidenced by his work, and also by his extensive art
library. His personal library runs far beyond the subject of art,
however, and is an actively perused repository of ideas and
inspiration.
In fact, in reviewing his long career, Aspevig observes
that one of the biggest transitions came when he began to
paint less and read more. “That really made a difference in
how I could refine my ideas. It’s gratifying to read someone
articulate an idea I’ve felt inside for so long.” He says that
when he reads writers such as Wallace Stegner, it helps clarify
his own sense of purpose—like the pressing desire to create a
record of the western landscape that’s fast disappearing under
the enormous pressures of economic expansion, cultural permutation, and a changing climate.
Aspevig has spent 35 years traveling the West, up and
down the Rockies, painting and absorbing and observing. The
report, he says, especially from the prairie, is not good. The
deterioration he’s witnessed over time spurred him to become
involved with the American Prairie Foundation, of which he
is a board member.
“Both my grandfathers were up there sod busting and
homesteading, and now 100 years later, I’m trying to preserve some of the land they were so anxious to get their plow
into.”
The idea isn’t to end agriculture, he says, or the rural culture surrounding it, which he holds dear in his own memory.
“To cross U.S. Highway 2 with a fully loaded grain truck,”
he recalls, “and to be able to use the clutch and get it up the
ramp at the elevator without rolling back and hitting the
truck behind you, that was your passage into manhood.” The
goal of the prairie project is, he says, to conserve what native
prairie is left in order to maintain the natural diversity that
benefits people as well as the intricately interdependent plants
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Big Sky Journal 127
and animals reliant on that ecosystem.
One of the reasons he feels so in tune with the project is
the way it puts together different pieces—ideas, options, farmsteads, families, unbroken parcels of native land—to make a
whole. “That’s what painting is. Harmony of the whole. If you
have one wrong accent, one wrong value, it destroys the unity.
While you may never achieve perfection, just trying to make
things better is always preferable to the other side of it.” For
Aspevig, the ideas always come back to art—whether it’s the
environment he’s talking about, or life.
“Look,” he says, pointing to Fall on the Yellowstone.
“Autumn in its full glory.” Spectacular, but it only lasts a short
time. How many more autumns, he asks, do we get to experience in our lives? We have to savor each one. “So this painting
is about the full glory of autumn, but it’s also the suggestion
of these darker clouds coming in. The evening sky. You know
it’s going to end.” We’re so intertwined and hard-wired in
how we evolved with the earth, he says, that whether we’re
conscious of it or not, we relate to these cycles in our own
minds and bodies.
For all the intensity Aspevig feels about his ideas and his
art, he never tells anyone what, or how, to think about his
paintings. “I’ve had people say they love a painting, that it
makes them feel good. That’s great,” he says.
He’s already done his thinking. And now it’s our turn, if
we’re so inclined. Why does the painting make us feel good?
Or why not? It’s not a test; it’s an opportunity to ask our own
questions and form our own ideas, perhaps on the purpose
of art and work. Or about our place in time, on the land, or
what we want and where we want to be, metaphorically and
in reality—in all its component parts.
The catalog of Aspevig’s 2004 Museum of the Rockies
show includes an excerpt from Wallace Stegner’s “The Sound
of Mountain Water.” “One means of sanity,” Stegner writes,
“is to retain a hold on the natural world, to remain, insofar as
we can, good animals.”
What sanity, what joy, to be a good animal, resting in the
deep, softly lit layers of a Clyde Aspevig landscape. BSJ
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