Arthur Chartow

Artist’s Statement

The ancient cave painters painted what they hungered for, the animals that provided their sustenance. In a sense, humans haven’t evolved much from the hunter-gatherer cave dwellers, and today, having built insulating walls between ourselves and the natural world we find we have a great longing for natural landscapes. Somehow, painting satisfies this hunger, addressing the desire to leave behind the entrapments of daily life, providing a point of embarkation into new worlds of beauty, vastness or menace.

My formative years as an artist were spent in New York spending time before some of its great trove of art. Mentally flying freely through Bruegel’s “Harvesters” at the Met, it wasn’t the drowsy harvesters, but the lanes through the wheat fields that led to the coastal town and the ocean beyond that stoked my imagination. It was the idea that a painting could take me away to someplace different.

I also spent a lot of time at the American Museum of Natural History, where I was drawn to the animal dioramas. It wasn’t the antelope that held my interest; rather, it was the hills off in the distant background that beckoned. Of course, those hills, those acacia trees, and the whole bright African afternoon were fictions painted on the curved wall at the back of the display. Ever since, I have found in paintings a place for wandering.

The real-world landscapes of today are under pressure. Landscapes can be a tranquil preserve, or a windy early morning beach; or maybe someone’s workplace: a steel mill, assembly plant, a warehouse; maybe a brownfield, what’s left after an industrial installation is torn down. Landscapes are constantly changing, being destroyed and built up. Nowhere is this more visible than in the city, where change occurs on a fast, human timetable rather than on a slow, geological one.

I live in the Detroit area, a gritty urban hub of America’s industrial rust belt—what’s left of it. Over the past decade, I’ve taken up the urban landscape as a subject: the factories, refineries, railroad tracks, trucks, dumpsters, power lines, power plants, coal hills and piles of scrap metal; coal-fired power plants, their smokestacks reaching for skies sometimes torrid, sometimes sullen; unpeopled city streets, dark bridges and looming steel mills—painting these subjects makes apparent the feelings generated: loss, regret, alienation, fear, wonder, pride, hope and anxiety over the future.

The industrial landscape is undergoing sweeping changes. Smokestacks are being replaced by wind turbines, and as heavy manufacturing jobs are shipped overseas the factories that once housed them first become derelict, then disappear altogether—entire industrial sites visible in my work are now gone, replaced by brownfields. The giant industrial installations that once represented American strength, despite their monumentality and apparent solidity, now seem desperately fragile.

Although I work in the studio from sketches, photographic sources, memory and imagination, it’s not a matter of trying to render the place photographically; it’s a matter of painting what being in that place feels like, which may bring to it a sense of heightened reality. I want to distill a place down to its essence by using weather, time of day, color of light and point of view, as the result of a creative process that has at its core a contemplative, spiritual relationship to the landscape, of a sort which Emerson in his essay Nature likened to becoming “a transparent eyeball.” How that plays into dealing with the industrial landscape is a question the answer to which I am still finding out.