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Cynthia Charters, Elegant Simplification of Nature's Phenomena

By Katherine M. Littell

In 1903, Lorenzo Palmer Latimer, master of California watercolor, admonished his students of landscape painting: "To the Californian I say, stay here. Go abroad to study if you can and will but return to your birthplace to do your life work. You can never feel any other inspiration like that of home. If the redwoods or the beach or the plains are yours by right of birth, go back to them and you will paint with a deeper feeling than any other spot."

California born, Cynthia Charters is living this good advice. In 1981, she received her Master of Arts in Art History from the University of California, Davis, lectured and served as Gallery Manager and Curator at Davis and Stanislaus, and in 1988 was artist in residence in Yosemite. She has also been a juror, consultant and panelist at significant art functions in the San Joaquin and Sacramento areas. Charters is listed in Art in America Guide to Art and Artists, Who's Who in the West, and California Art Review.

Artist, teacher, wife and mother, Charters, fully engaged in the world around her, is gifted with a mystic sense of the mundane. Her work reflects an elegant simplification of nature's phenomena to its essential forms, a meeting of her monastic inner life with undistorted reality in an austere, though spontaneous freedom from pretense and decorative device. Although her depictions of the California landscape possess the sparkling flavor of the Pre-Impressionist tradition, her style is informed by broad contact with European and American sources.

Merced River Pond

In the mid-1980s, Charters was working on Central Valley Delta and river paintings from her West Sacramento studio, when she went to New York to see the exhibit of Eugene Atget's series of photographs of St. Cloud at the Museum of Modern Art. She was struck by his essentialization of a complex subject to large abstract elements in the manner of the American Abstractionists, Robert Motherwell and Clyfford Still. The results of this epiphany was Sacramento River at Bryte Bend, in which reflection mirrors the self, leading to revelation of what is not there in visible form. The simplified forms signal the calm center of being, immutable, and impervious to life's intrusions and disruptions. Charters' experience of Atget's work refined her contemplation of nature, reducing color, light and mass to the most basic indivisible essence in her search for that which is universal about her subject. For Charters, all realism is based on abstraction, which, in turn, derives from its opposite, realism. Her approach is to paint at honestly and straightforwardly as possible through observation, en plein air, refining and finishing her canvas in the studio. Charters favors placing her subjects contre jour, against the light, for maximum definition in silhouette. Acquaintance with Sanford Gifford's Hunter Mountain, Twilight (1866) at the Terra Museum of American Art in Chicago, along with its source, a small sketch (1865), solidified her use of the silhouette on a small scale to capture and express the abstraction in her large canvases. Other practitioners of the contre jour technique who continue to inform her work are: Charles Daubigny, George Inness, and the American Luminists Martin Johnson Heade and Fitz Hugh Lane.

"Spontaneity is ninety percent preparation," Charters observes. Before painting a particular view, she studies and sketches from the fundamental form. The composition is anchored by a horizon line near the center of the canvas and the rounded, solitary shapes and reflections relate harmoniously to each other. The meditative, tonal quality and perfect balance of the abstracted forms echo the solitary objects of Giorgio Morandi in their mystical constellation based on mathematical plan. William Carlos Williams' verbal meditations on objects reflects this archetype of design as the idea behind the thing. Charters' abstracted essence thus emerges on the canvas with a complexity which addresses invisible immanence, as in Merced River Pond.

Since moving to the San Joaquin Valley, her muted colors are enlivened by subtle nuances of tone which inform the quality of light. In Merced River at Cressey, a Northern European, Scandinavian brightness, weightier and more substantial than the effervescence of French Impressionism, is diffused throughout the canvas, lending depth and credibility to the reality depicted. Charters perfected this handling of light after studying the work of the Finnish painters, Ellen Thesleff and Albert Edeleflt. Charters seeks to present the idea of light rather than paint the light. Shadows are abstracted, geometric and yet depicted in concrete form, a stylistic device developed from her studies of Wayne Thiebaud.

The specific focus on detailed pattern in Charters' work reflects her scientific background. Charters' early interest in entomology led to botanical illustration. Her descriptions of nature are thus rooted in naturalism, free of the nationalistic, political dimension which characterized her mentor in this regard, Frederic Edwin Church. Charters shares Church's documentary attention to flora and fauna, as exemplified in her favorite of all his paintings, Moonlight in the Tropics, without, however, Church's tendency to idealization based on literary and historical sources. Charters' modeling of the forms of nature, though metaphorical, are conceptually realistic and intended to define the essential quality of place. Charters translates her own experience of objects into simplifications imbued with freshness, innocence and intimate vitality, thus avoiding the sterility of masculine addiction to intellectual abstraction. Charters' art, like Constable's Cenotaph, another source of inspiration to her, is a temple within a temple beyond the conventional, sentimental, picturesque or crassly objective and deprived of emotion. Charters' sophisticated essentialization of form is well summed up in the Navajo Night Chant - The Pollen Path:

In the trail of the Pollen of Dawn I am wandering,
Where the dark rain cloud hangs low before the door I am wandering
In the house of long life I will wander
In the house of happiness I will wander.
With beauty before me I will wander
With beauty behind me I will wander
In old age traveling
On the trail of beauty I will wander
It shall be finished in beauty.