Larry Horowitz's strength as a painter lies in his ability to make you feel what he experiences in nature. His paintings not only pull you inside his scenes; they allow you to feel nature's silent grandeur in much the same way American painters of the 19th century felt it when they discovered for themselves the unknown wonders of this continent. That the places Horowitz paints were discovered long ago hardly matters. The urge to experience a sense of discovery is a defining feature of our national character, and if you think that our history of allegorical painting somehow makes depictions of the American landscape passé, you haven't looked at a Larry Horowitz picture.
Look closely at the surface of any Horowitz oil painting, pastel drawing or watercolor, and you'll see a canny distillation of art historical styles that when filtered through Horowitz's New York School sensibility add up to a viewing experience that is both physical and cerebral. You can take Horowitz's pictures at face value and enjoy the visceral thrill of the scenes he creates in plein air, or you can immerse yourself in the exquisite details of their construction.
This pleasurable bifurcation is made possible by the uncommon fact that Horowitz is an abstract painter who chooses to make representational pictures' pictures whose spirit is post-Impressionist, but whose internal architecture and surface mannerisms are rooted in mid-20th-century Abstract Expressionism. Of course, the most obvious bifurcation here is the two subjects at hand, Hawaii and Alaska -- two regions whose topography, climate and history couldn't be more different.
"I start a painting by putting those marks down, and I try to make it as close to my inner truth as it can be." --Larry Horowitz
Horowitz has worked on both coasts of the U.S. and in many foreign countries, and in each locale, he's demonstrated the myriad ways in which he can exercise his penchant for gestural and chromatic freedom while preserving the emotional and pictorial fidelity of a scene. "Art is about what you don't know," Horowitz likes to say, and in the journeys that produced "Hawaii and Alaska", he found his considerable painterly skills challenged by the sheer exoticism of the scenes that lay before him.
The Hawaiian Islands with their turquoise water, fiery sunsets, live volcanoes, preternaturally bright foliage and Polynesian culture pushed Horowitz in new directions. Some of the scenes, in fact, were so foreign to his East Coast eyes that "there were times when I felt inadequate to paint."
"Above the Clouds,"an oil painting of the view from atop Haleakala Volcano on Maui, is a good example. At first glance, this is a picture of breakers pounding a beach. Close inspection reveals a cloud-engulfed mountain seen from above, a view "similar to what you get flying in an airplane," says Horowitz. He could have kept the scene intact spatially, but instead chose to paint the topographical dislocation he felt by placing the clouds in roughly the same plane as the valley below. The result is an optical joyride whose upending of the "normal" relationship between sea, land and sky does everything but induce vertigo.
In "Punaluu Black Sand Beach," a pastel done on Oahu, Horowitz rotates our binocular worldview 90 degrees, forcing us to consider a quintessential island scene from the perspective of a Chinese scroll in which the sky occupies two-thirds of the composition. "I love the idea of a vertical panorama, of art being a slice of life," says Horowitz. When he made the drawing, "the clouds were moving at a tremendous pace, and there were turtles nesting in the sand. It was almost God-like the way you feel the massive power of nature in a place like that." The result is an almost voyeuristic, through-the-keyhole feeling. In similarly reductive manner,
"Dramatic Sunset," a pastel done in Maui, shows Horowitz operating under the influence of the Norwegian expressionist Edvard Munch, paring his colors down to two key shades, yellow and purple, to create a contemplative, melancholy seascape that borders on the mystical.
Color is, of course, the main event in Hawaii, and Horowitz gives it to us full-strength in the Big Island oil painting "After the Rain." Sketched in the hills of Waimea, it employs a supersaturated backlit sky to transform the foreground into a chromatic blaze of yellows, oranges, golds and greens. Unlike anything else in the Hawaii series, this painting recalls, in its audacity and daring, post-impressionists like the Nabi painter Paul Serusier and the Fauvist Maurice de Vlaminck, artists who under the respective influences of Gauguin and van Gogh favored flaming, brash colors in abstract forms.
Elsewhere, in "Distant Lava Flow," which depicts a plume of steam arising from a stream of magma hitting the ocean at Volcano National Park, Horowitz uses strong color, but in a different manner, laying down a 19th-century New England tonal palette in a heavy impasto. Here, Horowitz's gestures are so raw and his light so vivid that you can practically feel the porous rock beneath your feet and smell the mix of steam, sulfur and salt air.
In Alaska, Horowitz encountered a radically different environment: towering peaks that stretch for hundreds of miles; glacier-carved valleys where snowmelt drives boulders and icebergs into deep-water lakes; fast-shifting weather patterns; and a 24-hour June sun that paints the sky "an incredible robin's egg blue." Intermixed with the scenery was the history of Alaska's native tribes, its Russian villages, thriving fishing industry and the boom-and-bust economic cycles that have always defined America's 49th state. "All of this stuff was swirling around in my mind as I drove through these places," says Horowitz.
When he's not traveling four months a year to feed his appetite for new imagery, Horowitz divides his time between homes in upstate New York and Cape Cod, routinely working eight to ten hours a day on outdoor sketches which he translates to canvas in his studio. But in Alaska, the "grandeur" of the landscape, combined with the "otherworldly" quality of the midnight sun, pushed him to work even longer. During his two-week stay, Horowitz hardly slept. He'd wake up around 4 a.m. and work until 1 or 2 a.m., napping only when the weather was really bad. Yet even then, there were times when he'd brave the elements in a caffeine-fueled, sleep-deprived state to record a fleeting scene.
"Homer Spit Panorama II," a pastel drawing on black paper, is one such scene. Half of a diptych, it shows a long stretch of beach with a mountain in the background, a typical Alaskan view. What's unusual is that it's raining on the left side of the picture and sunny on the right. Horowitz uses this collision of weather patterns to create a subtle yet charged portrait. The sea is gun-metal gray; the mountain in the distance is blue and lavender; and the sky is a nondescript, overcast gray-blue, cleaved by vertical scratches that imply rain without overtly describing it. The picture's focal point, though, is the beach. It's bathed in a cloud-filtered light that makes the sparse foliage glow in colors that seem imported from another universe. Chartreuse? Jade? Lavender? These colors shouldn't fit. But Horowitz makes you believe they do.
In "Glacier Lake," the largest canvas in this cycle (5' x 7.5' ), Horowitz, with a fully loaded palette knife, evokes Courbet with a view of the high, flat boggy area along the Glenn Highway with the Wrangell-Saint Elias range in the distance. The sky is a pastel riot of interwoven horizontal strokes separated by a thinly painted lake, which is offset by a foreground of dark vertical strokes that define a shoreline of wheat-colored grasses and dark trees. Apart from the fact that the picture is a prime example of Horowitz laying down slabs of paint to build a coherent, representational whole, the big surprise here is that he evokes warmth. "All this lush greenery amidst melting snow and ice is not what you expect," says Horowitz about the atmospheric and geological surprises he encountered.
The icebergs that float beside verdant grass in "Portage Glacier," he explains, cracked off the mountain in the background and floated into the lake, "spinning in a constant cycle, from top to bottom and emitting creaking sounds like they're alive." Unlike his oils, which for the most part are saturated accretions of palette knife-applied paint, this small, quiet watercolor (and others like it) seems Spartan yet complete. Dabs of only a few colors that resemble small paw prints, they evoke their subjects with remarkable specificity and recall the frosty austerity of Munch, whose scenes were often illuminated by midnight sun.
As a painter who travels for inspiration, Horowitz studiously avoids landmarks. He favors roadside vistas that tourists generally bypass and spends what few off-hours he has in local hangouts to eavesdrop and observe. This modus operandi not only allows him to sidestep clichés but also to find pictorial elements or approaches that help him inject visual excitement into a scene.
He begins every picture with two marks, and from those he lays down others in response to what came before. "I'm always trying to see what edge I can break," Horowitz says, explaining his process-oriented approach. "I'll take a color that doesn't belong, and I'll try to kill the painting and react to that." Example: "You look at a tree and think it should be green, but it can be completely different from what you think," he says, noting that the Hudson River School painters - a group generally thought of as realists - often used colors that were totally over-the-top - when it suited their needs. "What I find interesting," he continues, "is that every painting has a different resolution. I'm not trying to make them different; they just are."
In Horowitz we find no aesthetic orthodoxies, only a self-created hybrid. He paints what he feels and wears his influences on his sleeve. A partial list of his sources includes Goya, Rembrandt, Albert Pinkham Ryder, Velasquez, Jackson Pollack and Wolf Kahn. A diverse list to say the least! Kahn, the famed second-generation New York School painter for whom Horowitz once worked as a studio assistant, was an early mentor and a true hybrid himself, the only one of that group to make a career out of painting landscapes in an abstract expressionist mode. It was through Kahn that Horowitz absorbed the massively influential "push-pull" compositional technique of Hans Hoffman, as well as the intellectual rigor that comes from living and working among top-tier New York artists. Also during this period, Horowitz, in response to Old Master pastels, developed a line of pigments based on the antique formulas that were subsequently adopted by Kahn, Jennifer Bartlett and others. That investigation into the properties of pigment gave Horowitz the ability to identify the colors in his paint box by sense of smell. Equally noteworthy is the fact that in the mid-1980s, right as his career began to take off, Horowitz met Willem de Kooning. The late abstract expressionist master bought two of Horowitz's pastel drawings and invited the young artist to his studio, a life-changing event Horowitz calls up when he faces a particularly knotty painting problem.
Like the abstract expressionists of the last century and the painters before them who prefigured and originated modernism, Horowitz is deeply in love with the tactility of paint and the myriad ways it can be pushed, pulled and prodded to achieve a singular vision. "Twenty years ago," Horowitz recalls, "I'd have an idea, and I'd force the painting to be that idea. Now I don't have an idea. I start a painting by putting those marks down, and I try to make it as close to my inner truth as it can be." He likens his own creativity to "a stream that's always running. "If I don't dip my hand into that stream everyday I might miss the breakthrough that takes me to the next level." In "Hawaii and Alaska," you'll find abundant evidence that Horowitz has, indeed, reached a new level.
-David M. Roth is contributing editor to Artweek and a reviewer for Art Ltd.. He lives in Sacramento.
an oil painting of the view from atop Haleakala Volcano on Maui, is a good example. At first glance, this is a picture of breakers pounding a beach. Close inspection reveals a cloud-engulfed mountain seen from above, a view "similar to what you get flying in an airplane," says Horowitz. He could have kept the scene intact spatially, but instead chose to paint the topographical dislocation he felt by placing the clouds in roughly the same plane as the valley below. The result is an optical joyride whose upending of the "normal" relationship between sea, land and sky does everything but induce vertigo.
binocular worldview 90 degrees, forcing us to consider a quintessential island scene from the perspective of a Chinese scroll in which the sky occupies two-thirds of the composition. "I love the idea of a vertical panorama, of art being a slice of life," says Horowitz. When he made the drawing, "the clouds were moving at a tremendous pace, and there were turtles nesting in the sand. It was almost God-like the way you feel the massive power of nature in a place like that." The result is an almost voyeuristic, through-the-keyhole feeling. In similarly reductive manner, 
Dramatic Sunset," a pastel done in Maui, shows Horowitz operating under the influence of the Norwegian expressionist Edvard Munch, paring his colors down to two key shades, yellow and purple, to create a contemplative, melancholy seascape that borders on the mystical.
Sketched in the hills of Waimea, it employs a supersaturated backlit sky to transform the foreground into a chromatic blaze of yellows, oranges, golds and greens. Unlike anything else in the Hawaii series, this painting recalls, in its audacity and daring, post-impressionists like the Nabi painter Paul Serusier and the Fauvist Maurice de Vlaminck, artists who under the respective influences of Gauguin and van Gogh favored flaming, brash colors in abstract forms.
Horowitz uses strong color, but in a different manner, laying down a 19th-century New England tonal palette in a heavy impasto. Here, Horowitz's gestures are so raw and his light so vivid that you can practically feel the porous rock beneath your feet and smell the mix of steam, sulfur and salt air.
a pastel drawing on black paper, is one such scene. Half of a diptych, it shows a long stretch of beach with a mountain in the background, a typical Alaskan view. What's unusual is that it's raining on the left side of the picture and sunny on the right. Horowitz uses this collision of weather patterns to create a subtle yet charged portrait. The sea is gun-metal gray; the mountain in the distance is blue and lavender; and the sky is a nondescript, overcast gray-blue, cleaved by vertical scratches that imply rain without overtly describing it. The picture's focal point, though, is the beach. It's bathed in a cloud-filtered light that makes the sparse foliage glow in colors that seem imported from another universe. Chartreuse? Jade? Lavender? These colors shouldn't fit. But Horowitz makes you believe they do.
strokes separated by a thinly painted lake, which is offset by a foreground of dark vertical strokes that define a shoreline of wheat-colored grasses and dark trees. Apart from the fact that the picture is a prime example of Horowitz laying down slabs of paint to build a coherent, representational whole, the big surprise here is that he evokes warmth. "All this lush greenery amidst melting snow and ice is not what you expect," says Horowitz about the atmospheric and geological surprises he encountered.
are saturated accretions of palette knife-applied paint, this small, quiet watercolor (and others like it) seems Spartan yet complete. Dabs of only a few colors that resemble small paw prints, they evoke their subjects with remarkable specificity and recall the frosty austerity of Munch, whose scenes were often illuminated by midnight sun.