WORLDS OF COLOR
Landscape artist Severin Haines discovers new combinations with every canvas
Originally published in the New Bedford Standard-Times on February 15, 2008
To explain
his choice of colors and patterns, landscape painter Severin Haines says
simply, “Nature is the teacher.” More than 25 of Mr.
Haines’ scenes in oil on canvas are now on display at the New Bedford Art
Museum. His solo show, titled “Skude, 360º,” depicts the rough waters and
craggy coastline of the town of Skude in southwest Norway, where the artist was
born and spent his early years.
As the title implies, this exhibit reveals the landscape
from all angles. There are viewpoints from the land looking out to the sea in
each direction, as well as from the shoreline looking back to the land. The
unique geology of the Norwegian terrain offers three elements that interact in
an ever-changing array of tones and patterns: clouds, waves and rocks. “The color
idea is the most significant thing,” says Mr. Haines of the works in the show,
“and each painting has its own color world.”
To discover
these color worlds, the artist tests the possibilities with pastels. One room
of the exhibit displays a series of pastel studies, made on site in Skude. The
sensitive mark-making in these drawings reveals Mr. Haines’ openness to new
color choices. “One of the
things that working with pastels does for you as an artist is it limits color,”
Mr. Haines says. “Within that limitation, I strike combinations that I would
never find by myself.” He also
uses location photographs for compositional reference, but stresses that it is
“important that the paintings are more” than simply replicas of his
photographs.
In addition
to unexpected hues that resonate alongside one another, Mr. Haines achieves
“kick in the head” color impact by first covering his canvases with a vibrant
tone. This initial layer of red, orange, green or blue awakens each painting
with its own “character of light” and gives the subsequent layers of paint a
bright base for contrast.
Most of the
works in the exhibit were painted in 2007, while Mr. Haines was on sabbatical
from his professorship at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. But images
of Norway are second nature to the artist, who regularly visits his family’s
property in Skude. He has painted many of these views four or five times over
the years, some as many as 15 times. Between the
constant boat traffic along the North Sea and the shifting moods of the sky,
the shoreline of Skude is a “phenomenal place to sit and watch” … and, of
course, to paint.
Mr. Haines
was born in Norway in 1946. Good jobs were scarce after the ravages of World
War II, so in 1948 his father brought the family to Atlantic City, N.J., where
his brother ran a fishing business. Mr. Haines’
mother was unhappy in Atlantic City, and after several years there she and her
son moved back to Norway. It was then that Mr. Haines’ uncle, a sculptor, took
note of the boy’s precocious drawing ability. He saw that his nephew was
sketching horses – not an uncommon subject for a child to focus on – but he was
drawing them from the front rather than the simpler and more typical side view,
and in a rearing pose rather than standing still. This unusual perspective
showed artistic promise to the uncle, who insisted that his nephew should
receive “all the paper and pencils he needed.” He also recommended formal art
training. So when the
family returned to the United States a year later, this time to New Bedford
where Mrs. Haines’ sister and cousins lived, she took her son, then 7, to a
Saturday morning art class at the Swain School of Design.
It was the
beginning of a long and fruitful relationship with the Swain School. Mr. Haines
continued taking classes there through high school, then enrolled as an
undergraduate and finally received his bachelor’s degree in 1968. He spent a
summer at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, where the
other students were talking about their applications to Yale University. Then
and there he decided to “shoot for the moon” himself, applying to graduate
school at Yale. His acceptance “surprised the hell out of me,” the artist says,
remembering that he was “dancing around the living room” when his letter
arrived from the admissions department.
Mr. Haines
worked diligently as a graduate student at Yale, studying with professors
Lester Johnson and Bernard Chaet, whom he served as a drawing assistant. But one
experience in particular perplexed him. During his junior year at Swain, the
renowned painter Leland Bell had visited the school as a guest critic. He
responded favorably to Mr. Haines’ work, but just as he was leaving for the
day, he remarked to the undergraduate: “You’re not painting with color.”
By
coincidence, Mr. Bell visited Yale during Mr. Haines’ graduate studies. He
remembered Mr. Haines from Swain, greeted him warmly, complimented his work,
but again said just as he was leaving, “You’re still not painting with color.” This left the
young artist frustrated. He looked down at his palette and saw all the colors
of the spectrum sitting there. What exactly did Bell mean?
As
graduation approached, a classmate remarked one day on the depth of space in
Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, and Mr. Haines realized that here was the
answer. “The
contrast of the colors of the drips opened space,” Mr. Haines says. “That’s
color space. That’s painting with color.” This
discovery marked Mr. Haines’ transition from an art student guided by his professors
to an independent artist speaking in his own voice. He began to apply his
newfound understanding of color to his favorite subject, landscape, because
that was “the only place I could find the kind of freedom” he wanted from
painting.
One of his first
works out of graduate school was a painting of a briar patch. It was a complex
subject, but Mr. Haines was able to decipher it by using color to carve out the
implication of three-dimensional space. “This was the first time I felt I’d
made my own painting,” he recalls. From then
on, he never stopped working from the natural world. “Nature justified what I
was thinking,” Mr. Haines says. “It confirmed that my theory was correct.”
When
painting a complicated view such as a forest, for example, the artist found
that by carefully observing and recording nature’s colorations and designs, he
was able to “create order out of the chaos of the woods.” He took one
section at a time. One tree had a spread-out pattern, the next one had a
vertical pattern, and their differing colors separated them in space. Together,
each individual tree made up a forest. The artist
painted a forest scene on a life-sized scale when he created a wall mural at
the Nemasket Gallery in Fairhaven, a project for which he was awarded an Arts
Lottery Council grant. He has continued to exhibit his work on the Southcoast
and nationally over the course of his career, and is currently represented by
Galleri Amare in Norway. He has also curated three group exhibitions for the
New Bedford Art Museum. On a
personal note, Mr. Haines married his sweetheart from Fairhaven High School,
Cindy, in 1969. They have two daughters, Liv and Hannah.
Mr. Haines
has mentored many art students during his more than 30 years as a professor. He
began teaching at the Swain School of Design in 1975, serving as chair of the
painting department there from 1979 to 1988. That was the year that the Swain
School merged with the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. At that time Mr.
Haines accepted a professorship at UMass, a position he still holds today.
It is the
colors he sees in the landscape, and the visual and emotional space they create
in combination, that continue to inspire Mr. Haines. He says of
the color interactions in his work, “Something starts happening within the
painting, and then you get excited.”
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