“If you look back at me, I know it’s over,” says Randy Allen, standing in the Gallery at the Highland Center for the Arts, a series of his evocative abstracted landscapes staring back at him and other viewers.
Yellow fields of sunflowers, stormy skies, that thin sliver of brilliant orange light bursting through the mountains and clouds at sunset—with bold colors and brushstrokes, Allen packs abundant movement and light into his paintings. Combining a sense of spontaneity and connection with the landscape, his paintings are alive with intensity and intimacy.
“Feeling the Landscape,” Allen’s solo exhibition at the HCA, opened earlier this month and runs through September 11. The exhibition features about 30 of Allen’s paintings, oil on birch plywood, almost square, almost all new work from 2021-22.
In the HCA display case are some portrait sketches, drawings made at the Capitol Grounds Café a few years ago when Allen mentored students and they practiced drawing the people they saw there. The case also features several paintings of mountain biking—one of Allen’s athletic pursuits.
“Feeling the Landscape” is Allen’s first exhibition since 1999. Woodworking has been his priority in recent years, but the pandemic’s interruption turned him back to painting. With “Feeling the Landscape”, viewers appreciate that he has picked up his brushes again.
Allen, who now lives in Maple Corner, was born in Montpelier and raised in Middlesex and Worcester. He drew and painted from childhood, with dump trucks and gravel pits among his early favorite subjects. He joined the US Navy after high school and then went on to attend art school in Boston. Andrew Wyeth, Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bishoss were initial influences.
Early in Allen’s creative career, he worked as a salaried artist painting representational watercolors for a Boston gallery. For one commission, he painted 18 panels for a park carousel.
When Allen saw an exhibition of Wolf Kahn’s paintings, Kahn’s color and associations with landscape changed Allen’s direction. He returned to Vermont and turned to painting outside. Back in Montpelier, he co-founded North Branch Studios in 1987.
Maureen O’Connor Burgess, curator of the HCA gallery, has been drawn to Allen’s paintings since she first saw his work there more than three decades ago.
“I had thought of him as an abstract landscape painter – his paintings are not always site-specific and they thrive on a bold use of colour, light, texture and some form of the world around him,” said Burgess. “But hanging them, looking at them together, I realize that he really is an impressionist. His sometimes unmixed color and use of natural light – meant an obvious brush stroke. His bare impressions of the house, or the barn, or the rower might say so. His landscapes are clearer from a distance.”
Allen paints in his studio, although his paintings have an en plein air quality.
“His paintings embody that strong sense of the open air. He’s been in those places,” Burgess said. “He lives in those places. He carries them with him, and when he puts the brush down, to paint, to surface, his intuition takes over when maybe memory isn’t enough. and very soon, looking at these paintings, you realize that you have been there too. You know that emerald green next to that deepest pine, under that wonderful blue, or that rich unforgettable gold that shines under a shade more deep purple. You love that shot of red, perfectly placed, reminding you that something is changing. You remember that fog when you drove early one morning. Randy Allen’s landscapes embody the experience.”
When he returned to painting in 2020, Allen explained, it took a while to get back to the work that spoke to him. He tried to work in larger formats, but felt that they lacked spontaneity and cohesiveness.
“I like the smaller ones because they’re more like thoughts or impressions,” he said. “And I like the square. It forces me to think about composition. The square is not a landscape. If it’s horizontal, it’s like a landscape.”
“It became more about movements and gestures,” Allen said. “It’s kind of like abstract expressionism, but I have to hang it on a landscape to make sense to me. I lose if it’s all abstract.”
There are references to specific places in Allen’s work – clusters of barns, a place on Horn of the Moon Road – but he doesn’t paint them literally.
“Sometimes they start out quite literally, but then they don’t have any anger with them – and then I attack it quite strongly,” he said.
“Abstraction in my paintings fascinates me,” says Allen in his artist statement. “I like to play with the emotional aspects of these scenes… The scene that emerges is a memory – an impression caught in the corner of the eye. I seek to portray that kind of toughness and strength in my work.”
