TreeHistoric
MARK LAVATELLI
A “Sylvan Historian” in the Green, Green Rust Belt:
Some Musings on Paintings of Mark Lavatelli
Close your eyes. Now think about all the individual trees there are in the world, on the whole green earth or even
just in our immediate “world,” the lush green ecoregion of the Eastern Great Lakes where Buffalo is blessed to be
situated, where water is plentiful (albeit for part of each year in its solid or crystalline form), the growing season long
and profuse, and trees—mostly deciduous and leafy (defining our immediate biome), but also evergreen—abound
in number and variety and shades of green and in the shapes of their leaves and their changing colors and the
arrangement of their branches and the texture of their barks. The sheer number of trees—technically finite, though
it might as well be infinite (though less so than that of their leaves, or of blades of grass)—boggles the mind, even
just locally (how many there are just outside this gallery, on Essex Street, on the connecting network of avenues and
parkways and parks branching out across the city and stretching west to the water’s edge, how many in number and
how tall). But especially in the whole wide world—despite deserts, tundras, ice caps, and oceans—the number is
mind-boggling, as good as infinite. And yet we know that unknowable number is not enough. As seemingly infinitely many as there are, there are still not as many trees in the whole wide wooded world as we would wish. Amazon
rainforests are razed, northwest forests deforested by clearcutting, mountaintops stripmined just a few hours’ drive
to our south, woods wiped out by western wildfires. Event locally, in our recent history, towering elms and now ashes
have been eradicated by diseases, and trees of all types wounded (many mortally, most reparably, in time) by unseasonable storms with their heavy snows and high winds. So not enough trees. Never enough trees.
Now think about art, or just about painting, or even just all the paintings of trees, or incidentally containing trees
(i.e., wooded landscapes). Not nearly as numerous as trees in nature, maybe not even as numerous as other motifs
in painting (human limbs draped and undraped, fruits of trees arranged on wooden tables, timbered dwellings and
crosses and masts fashioned from trees), but still very numerous. For how many painters—from the lowly amateurs
all the way up to the immortal masters—have painted trees. Not as close to infinite in number as trees themselves,
but still too many to count, although not too many to have.
And yet, when I think of paintings of trees—not just here in present-day Buffalo, but in the whole wide world of paintings, past and present—I think first of the paintings of Mark Lavatelli. I think of Charles Burchfield, too, of course,
and his usually lonelier, always more luminous trees, but that second thought serves as a touchstone, reinforcing
my initial conviction about that signature (almost sole) subject of Lavatelli’s work. For when Lavatelli was invited to
put his trees up against Burchfield’s—encaustics side-by-side with watercolors—for the exhibition Trees Interpreted:
Charles Burchfield and Mark Lavatelli (Burchfield Penney Art Center, April 22–October 22, 2006), they held their
own—more than held their own—with the works of the earlier master of a different medium with which they were
paired. They were tested against the best, and passed the test.
Moreover, when, out in nature, or indoors looking out (through a window, say), I behold the branches of trees at
a particular time of day (or year), bare or leaf-laden, backgrounded against the sky, branching out in that particular way branches do (both ordered and chaotic at once), from trunks sturdy or slender, singular and centered or
grouped and parallel, arranged on a plane or receding into space, but always (to state the obvious) upright, as tree
trunks, by their essential nature, always are (unless felled or windbent, the exceptions that prove the rule), I often
catch myself thinking (more often than not, in fact), not just of those trees, or trees in general, or the uprightness
(verticality) of their trunks, or their orderly or chaotic branching out (angularity) against the sky, or their bareness or
leafiness, but of the paintings of Mark Lavatelli. Having seen so many of his paintings over his years in Buffalo, I
not only recognize his signature style and subject matter, but I now see Lavatellis in the trees, in the wooded world
out there. Which for me is one measure of the mastery of a painter: not only that he or she brings a distinctive (and
eventually distinguishing) style to his or her chosen subject, but, by force of sustained engagement with that subject
in a particular medium over time, actually imposes that distinct vision on the subject, which is to say—if the subject
be trees—on nature itself. So that you (the viewer) not only come to recognize the painter’s distinctive style in the
works (which art history can teach you), but to behold nature (or at least that piece of nature attended to, obsessed
over by, the painter) anew, through the painter’s eyes, which only painters themselves can show you.
Now open your eyes. Let them adjust to the light of the gallery, the artificial light. (Outside above Essex Street
natural daylight is fading fast, the still-leafy treetops looming against the darkening sky, perhaps lit from below by
streetlamp light, or is that tinge of acid yellow the early onset of autumn?) All around you are paintings (or mostly
paintings), big ones, smaller ones, some layered with collage, one with a small inkjet print of a photo inset in a little
niche but otherwise two-dimensional, square or rectangular, and composed for the most part of squares and rectangles, a couple of diptychs, a 40-year-old serigraph in bright primary colors made by an artist in his twenties. To state
the obvious once again (and all commentary on paintings should never do more than state the obvious, i.e., render
in words what’s already apparent in the paintings for all to see), all (even that one, the 1975 serigraph, albeit that
one is more abstract, or rather even more abstract than all the others, which are no less abstract than it) seem to be
depictions of trees. But really what must be said (despite all the foregoing talk of trees, a worthy subject in its own
right) is that the paintings are not trees at all (as Magritte’s pipe is not a pipe), but paintings. Obviously. Very masterful paintings, I would say, not for the realism of their rendering, by which some viewers (or makers) of paintings
might measure mastery, but for their formal composition, surface textures, materiality, and mastery of medium.
I speak not of the gathered “maple saplings” dragged in from outdoors, standing in three-dimensional space
amongst us gallery goers; they and we are merely real. But speaking of sap, a very sappy but much memorized
poem by a well-known but very minor poet ends—as badly as it begins—with the unjustly famous couplet “Poems
are made by fools like me, / But only God can make a tree.” To paraphrase a more worthy (and almost as famous,
but more justly so) concluding couplet from a masterpiece by a major poet—also coincidentally with the initials
J.K.—who died even younger (26) than their author (Joyce Kilmer died at 31 in the Second Battle of the Marne, July
30, 1918), those lines (Kilmer’s, I mean), albeit famous, are neither beautiful nor true. Kilmer somehow manages—
with false modesty and in just 15 syllables—to disparage all poems (and poets) as “foolish” while at the same time
flattering himself by lumping himself in with his betters (“like me”) as playing second fiddle, yes, but only to God.
Not a believer myself (nature “makes” trees, the earth “makes” trees, trees in their death and decay “make” earth,
etc., is what I believe), I also don’t hold human makers—poets and painters—in as low regard as the author of
“Trees” pretends to. In fact I hold them (poets, painters, all artists in all mediums) in the highest regard of any being,
even the fools, even, if pressed, fools like him. Nature might arguably be greater than art, OK, is greater than art,
because artists—like all human beings—as well as all their subjects and materials, their brains and eyes and hands,
come from nature, and nature is glorious and all that. Where would we be without it? But when it comes to creators,
there is no creator higher than the human creator of art of any kind. An inferior poem like “Trees” may indeed be
“only” a poem, and “made” by a “fool,” but a great poem like the odes of the other J.K. is a unique creation of considerable greatness (as is a great Grecian urn, say), arguably greater than any individual nightingale or “leaf-fringed”
tree in nature, since trees in paintings (as in poems)…well, let J.K. (the good one) tell it himself: “nor ever can those
trees be bare;… Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed / Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu.”
In the artistic discipline of painting, and particularly in his signature medium of dry pigment and encaustic, Mark Lavatelli is such a master. This exhibition alludes briefly (with “Treescape” and “Deadfall Timber”) to his earliest engagement with the subject of trees long before he moved back to the Eastern Great Lakes ecoregion (he had spent part
of his early education at Cornell, in the nearby Finger Lakes, but had lived in the Midwest and southwestern desert
region before moving to Buffalo) before quickly catching us up with his work of this century, this decade, and this
year. I’ve loved his work (and his work ethic and mastery of medium) since the beginning of his time in Buffalo.
Despite being a fan of text in visual art in general (in Cubist still lifes, collages, and the like), however, I resisted
his first forays into overlaying stenciled words as an added element in the compositions, along with the trunks and
branches, arrangements of squares and rectangles, bands of color, and collage. At first they seemed extraneous,
unnecessary. But after our recent studio visit, and his explanation of the process by which he came to choose the
words, starting out with chance but ending up with carefully chosen elemental words (earth, water, fire, CO2, etc.), I
have really come to appreciate them more, especially the relationship of the words not so much to nature and environment—though there is that, too, of course—but their relationship to the literal materiality of the paintings: the dry
pigments he crushes into powder are chunks of colored earth, the blocks of beeswax are a solid (and a surprisingly
durable one once a painting is finished) at air temperature that is liquefied and mixed with the powdered pigment on
a palette surface of lightbulb-heated sheet metal, solidifies instantly (much faster than pigment in wet fresco plaster,
though there is a time limit on that process, too), and can be reliquefied indefinitely for reworking by the deft application of other forms of “fire” (hot air from a heat gun, flame from a butane torch). The paintings with the stenciled
words are made with fire of the stuff of earth and nature (mineral and animal: the pigments and the bees), depict
nature more or less abstractly (mostly vegetable: the trees and, in more recent works, flowers), and refer to it linguistically, all at the same time.
But the works I love most in this show at Big Orbit, I am happy to report, are the most recent ones, whether oil on
large rolled canvases or encaustic on panels, whether actual diptychs or diptych-like, whether relatively realistic (as
in the ones with bright green pine brushes) or highly formalized. I love the purity of color of the new ones, especially
their backgrounds (although nothing matches the red in the 1996 diptych “Haven”), the new introduction of more
fragile flower petal forms amidst the gridwork of branches, the sense of locality in titles like “NY Pines,” “Hoyt Lake,”
and “Griffis Pine.”
Buffalo’s abundant waterways brought industry (grain and electricity and steel), and the decline of industry left the
rust (iron + water + air) by which we are now known, but rust is also a pigment, and Buffalo is also ever green, and
we see in this show how fortunate we are to have industrious and rust-inspired artists like this master of earthen
pigments, heat-softened surfaces, air-cooled solidity, and sylvan abstraction.
Edmund Cardoni
September 5, 2014
Treescape, 1975, 11” x 14”, serigraph.
Object Tree #11, 1996, 30” x 22”, gum arabic, dry pigment, and encaustic on paper.
Deadfall Timber II, 1978, 48” x 59”, oil on canvas.
Warning, 2013, 43” x 39”, encaustic and collage on panel.
Haven, 1996, 122” x 72” (diptych), oil on canvas.
Griffis Pine, 2014, 144” x 96”, oil on canvas.
This publication has been produced in conjunction with the exhibition TreeHistoric as part of
the Annual Big Orbit Members’ Show Exhibition Award, selected by an outside juror. On display
at Big Orbit Gallery from September 13, 2014 through October 26, 2014. Essay by Edmund
Cardoni. Booklet designed by CEPA Gallery. The exhibition and booklet were funded by the
New York State Council on the Arts, and Erie County Cultural Funding. © 2014 Big Orbit Gallery,
Mark Lavatelli.
Big Orbit Gallery • 30D Essex Street • Buffalo, New York 14213 •
www.bigorbitgallery.org