By Amy Davis
For Alan Gough, it’s clear that art acts as both career and calling. It creeps into his conversation like crabgrass on a lawn. Even when he doesn’t mean to broach the topic, literature, music and of course painting are there, hovering guests waiting to be introduced by their host.
And despite conventional wisdom’s catchphrase, Gough is anything but a tortured artist. Indeed, art for him expresses the best in life. “I’m not a social painter,” he says, “I’d find it hard to work day after day in something with such toil and stress. I’d rather find solace in what I do.”
This calm, contented, enriched perspective is what one would hope to find – but never expect – in a painter of works such as Gough’s. His landscapes are lyrical, a beguiling confluence of technical precision, operatic emotion and cerebral composition. He shakes up contemporary representational painting without making a big show of it.
Tim Keny, director of Keny Galleries, who represents Gough, explains the effect of looking at one of Gough’s paintings. “I knew he had great technique, but when I looked at a large group of them, I realized that this man knows spatial tension, asymmetrical balance … there’s an abstract structure in the best of his works.”
Stone, Shutter, Shrub, Sun, Shadow and Snow
is one such fascinating work. Shadows crisscross a stone wall, intersecting the straight lines of each brick. A sliver of a window shutter and a bush topped with snow peak out the right side of the canvas. It looks like the normal “viewfinder” was pushed to the side, the viewfinder literally nudged to the left to reveal the far less obvious beauty of the – at first glance, blank – wall.
In conversation with Gough, one begins to feel that he’s figured it all out. He likes public radio, Bach and opera. He loves his rural home in Chillicothe, where he’s lived almost his entire life. He left a grueling, stress-filled career in Chicago for one that, even if he were unpaid, he’d continue.
Gough has been a professional fine artist since 1959, when he left his position as a commercial artist and was first able to support himself and his family from his studio work. As a commercial artist, Gough had two weeks of vacation twice a year. “I used those two weeks to paint. I got into the car with all my painting gear and I went back to Ross County where I grew up.”
Soon he had created a large body of landscapes, and also found it increasingly difficult to go back to his job. “There just wasn’t time for launching out and exploring.”
But his life as an artist began far before that time, dating back to what he remembers as his “first lesson in two point perspective” from his engineer father as a five year old.
He also remembers the moment when he became transfixed by the idea of representation.
“When I was about a fourth or fifth grader, going home for lunch I saw a group of seventh or eighth graders in an art class. There was a girl working on a Celtic cross window…That she had taken that window and transferred it to paper was a seminal moment for me. After that, I knew I wanted to work with the illusion of depth and space and shape.”
Gough’s artistic training continued when he studied at American Academy of Art in Chicago as an undergraduate in the 1940s. There, he did entirely figurative work, drawing from a model. Gough explained that since the Academy’s philosophy was that “the figure is the most disciplining (artistic endeavor). One can adapt to any other subject afterwards.”
Combining his rigorous technical training and love of his childhood home in Chillicothe, Gough did just that – and adapted those skills to his dynamic, poetic landscapes.
This combination of technical expertise and pure environmental enjoyment is evident in works like Ending at Rueb’s. A fence rises from the lower left corner of the canvas, reading as a confusing shamble of wood. Branches creep across the top left, a reiteration of the wood, yet gaining organization. The rest of the canvas is devoted to a pure, stark landscape, fading out into the distance.
Gough cites his inspiration in artists such as John Constable, Winslow Homer, J.M.W. Turner and Edward Hopper. He also has a great appreciation for someone a bit more surprising: Chuck Close. “To me he is the most significant portrait painter of our time … (a Close portrait) is a person – an individual – with real thought and feeling.”
And when Gough explains that he views himself as creating “portraits of places,” his admiration of Close suddenly makes sense.
Gough also is very clear about why art is so potent for him, explaining what he calls “the power of a singular vision.” Gough explained what he meant using the example of a Francis Bacon exhibition in Chicago that he saw as a young man.
Gough was struck by Bacon’s exquisite technical skill, and found the surrealistic morphing of subjects faces terrifying. “All the people on the street as I was walking back, their faces were blurred. I thought ‘I don’t want to see the world this way!’ But of course, I already did because of Bacon.”
Gough too has a singular vision, one that leaves his audience with a sense that pastoral eloquence can be modern; that aesthetic pleasure can be as stimulating as turmoil; and that after all, the world is inherently a place of beauty.
Amy Davis is a contributing writer for CityScene Magazine.