Natural Progressions: Ron Milewicz’s Recent Work
Ron Milewicz’s recent landscapes of upstate New York forest scenes are alive with the animating force of a nature truly felt and accurately recorded. Luminous and powerful, these works attain through unassuming means painting’s elusive promise of a glimpse of anunchanging present. Yet they contain histories, serving as reminders that paintings carry the story of their making in the strokes and pigment of their surface as well as an imprint of the artist’s evolution of interests, skills and instincts. In Milewicz’s case this artistic trajectory feels relevant, as what came before feels living still, seed-like, in these present-day images of avibrant landscape newly seen.
Milewicz was for several years a painter associated with cityscapes. His work from 1998 – 2013 depicts the precisely rendered geometries of a sprawling New York, seen mostly from Long Island City studios and revisited in the varying weather and light of changing seasons and times of day. The precision of the drawing underlying these works is astonishing, with an incisive handling of shape, form and distance that infuses the most utilitarian objects with subtle identity. Industrial structures here become monolithically grand, buildings and roof tops seen from afar are as striking and solemn as statues. In 2013 Milewicz left the subject matter that had governed his work for over a decade and began painting a series of what might be termed “object-lifes” of items significant to his family history. Spools of thread, bricks, a shovel and a single hydrangea are among the subjects depicted in this series with formidable focus but little context; their density expressive of a weight of stories carried without being told.
Then, in 2016 Milewicz moved out of the city to reside mostly upstate, and there, surrounded by the forest life of his new home, he began to draw trees. Working outdoors from observation he developed the practice that still informs the current works, starting with structured graphite drawings that make sense of the visual tangle of forest floors, canopy and clearings. With a rare strength of editing and measurement, Milewicz stays faithful in these drawings tothe cues of his subject, marking out uncannily clear images of the natural world. He then, inthe studio, scales them down to smaller format paintings – now alight with dream-like colortransitions.
Milewicz’s individual artistic progression brings a unique power of observation, built throughyears navigating the complexity of cityscapes, architectural and still-life forms, to bear on the endless variation of the natural world. The shift traces a general movement from tectonic toorganic, and blends an established intensity of seeing with a newfound openness to the gentle mysteries of wilder settings. The resulting paintings – modestly scaled, softly hued asthey are – communicate the depth of a fully-realized painter’s vision
In terms of sensibility, Milewicz has always seen himself as a still-life painter. The description rings true even for these recent landscapes, and accounts in part for their fascination. The peculiar resonance of these paintings arises from the considered relationships betweendiscrete parts: from one object, one shape, one tone to the next, with each entity understood structurally as well as spatially.
In On Hillocks Blue, a grouping of trees receding into the forested distance opens up an extraordinary range of visual possibility through this kind of “still-life” dynamic. Slender tree trunks (which could have been easily perceived as a mass of undifferentiated verticals) here create between them shifting planes of active space, sparked by the slight curvatures and diagonals recorded in the sensitivity of their drawing. Another rich reading is possible withregard to tone and color, as gently shadowed blues of trunks in the foreground counter othertrees, and perhaps some newly-leafed shrubs, that appear almost white in contrast to the surrounding foliage. It can be some time before one notices that one tree has been placedto stand, with strength and grace, at the exact center of the composition.
Centrality is pushed still further as a structural and emotive force in Maple Swirl, where the magnificently branching forms of a single tree radiate upwards and outwards, playing a conductor-like role to the secondary tree forms suggested in the distance. It is worth the risk of anthropomorphizing to note that the theater or concert association is oddly fitting for Milewicz’s landscapes, which often feel like forums to which we are allowed access from the vantage point of any other tree.
Artists have been among those who have long intuited what is now being recorded in more scientific terms: that trees and living entities of the forest can exist in a state akin to mutual awareness, participating in a kind of communication. Painters including Charles Burchfield, Emily Carr and even Edvard Munch make explicit this interdependence, articulating interacting “auras” of their natural subjects to convey the landscape’s collective energy. Milewicz is less emphatic in evoking these invisible dynamics through brushwork, instead allowing the subtle correspondences of tone and shape to impart a sense of a communion taking place. In Rocks, Pond, Moon the shared experience between the five central trees within a silvery-lit evening is unmistakable. In Twilit a conversational, finishing-another’s-sentence stance is established between two trunks, a lighter tone completed by a dark.
The playful balance of the Cedar and Pond works, where the broad, dark form of a peaked evergreen is weighted within the sloping planes of its setting, is one to which Milewicz’ has returned in several recent paintings. Through these works’ variations of color and mood the internal dynamics of the scene are set in contrast to the external forces of light and air. The effect is to emphasize a full and free totality always at play in these paintings, the ongoing exchange between the fixed and changeable forces of a living landscape.
It is remarkable that this is all accomplished within panels rarely larger than 12” in either dimension. In relation to Milewicz’s tested understanding of scale and pictorial geometry, this format raises the question: why are these works so small? The usual associations for diminutively sized works doesn’t quite fit, they don’t seem meant to be “jewel-like” orparticularly intimate in either subject or intention. The artist himself put one answer quite simply in a recent conversation: “The space of a painting is mental.” For an artist for whom drawing – the translation of all of reality’s unruliness into a single distilled image – has truly become second nature this assessment feels right. Once drawn into the worlds Milewicz has created, the viewer’s eye and mind can travel freely through to the silent places, pathways and distances they offer up. Their space is as big as the experience of sight.
The scale of Milewicz’s small works suggests other associations: they are invitational ratherthan confrontational, and by necessity built through brushstrokes that favor clarity over gesture. This implication of humility as applied to the works is accurate, but also inadequate. Given the artist’s forceful abilities of depiction they seem informed by what might be better described as a radical receptivity, a disappearing of self into the subject, which by extension offers the viewer an open-eyed engagement with nature’s wild and beautiful impulses.
Christina Kee, 2024