By Amy j. Barry
Photo from The New London Times
Publication The New London Times 8/12/10

Land Alive, the title of Killingworth resident Joan Levy Hepburn's new show that opened last week at both New London's TSETSE Gallery and Union Railroad Station, couldn't be a more evocative description of the artist's landscapes.

Deep, lush, and green, the paintings on a wall don't merely invite the viewer to observe them, but rather to walk through a twisty, moss-carpeted path, along a cool, blue stream, past vibrantly alive trees and plants, and the dry, broken ghosts of fallen limbs. In Hepburn's more myopic views, one can feel the delicate, velvety, pink bloom of a forest orchid, the slippery smooth Jack-in-the-pulpit's unfolding on a damp forest floor.

Many of the paintings in the shows are Hepburn's interpretations of the magnificent wooded landscape that surrounds her at Art at Murray Pond in Killingworth, a private nature preserve where she both resides and offers classes, workshops, and retreats. Other paintings are inspired by mountainous and stormy Western landscapes.

The centerpiece of the Union Railroad Station exhibition is three 48"x48" panels painted in graphite, oil pastel, and collage, titled September 11 Tryptych. This is only the second time it has been on public view and the high ceilings and large space of the station make the space an ideal backdrop for this powerful and imposing work.

Hepburn painted the triptych after visiting Ground Zero a few days after the World Trade Towers fell in order to process the event. Eerily, she says she had never gone into the Trade Towers, which were completed in 1972, the year she graduated high school.

"I always had a feeling that they weren't permanent," she says.

The fire was still burning and gray ash covered everything when she arrived at the site.

"The palette of the landscape reminded me of the platinum-colored part of Yellowstone where steam and sulphur are emitted from the ground and the spirits of the first Americans are present," describes Hepburn.

All of her subjects, she stresses, "are painted from the inside out."

"When the subject is fully perceived by all the senses and intellect of the artist, the artwork is born into the physical world and available to the viewer as Nature," she explains in her artist statement. "As the human body, mind, and spirit is part of all Nature, this approach to drawing and painting is existential. It documents the experience of being alive."


Mentored by a Master

A fateful day in 1970 profoundly shaped the path Hepburn's art would take. The renowned Dutch-American, abstract-expressionist painter Willem de Kooning (1904 to 1997) was visiting his daughter, a student at the same small, private high school (Buxton School) in Williamsburg, Massachusetts, that Hepburn attended. He spotted one of Hepburn's paintings hanging in the dining room and said he wanted to meet the person who painted it. She was just 15 years old.

"He took me under his wing and said if I ever wanted to talk about painting, to call him up and reverse the charges," Hepburn recalls. "I'd call him and talk to him for two hours at a time and went to his studio in East Hampton-it was filled with light and paintings."

Hepburn says de Kooning dissuaded her from going to college and convinced her to study with him instead, although years later she attended the Kansas City Art Institute, receiving a bachelor of fine arts degree.

"He was 50 years older than me, but treated me as though we were on the exact same level," Hepburn recalls. "He was so generous and supportive. I knew I had expressionistic tendencies, but I didn't know how to use it. I had to go out of my way not to paint [like him], but find my own voice."

Hepburn says she found that vehicle for expressing her voice in 1984 when she moved to Killingworth and plugged into the landscape.

"It was a total mess," she says of the 10-acre property. "I cleared the land, designed and built the [art center]. There were beautiful outcroppings of ledge and moss, a pond, and a bog. I got rid of the 'visual unwanteds' so I could see the pure visual form and make paintings of it."

Hepburn paints outside year-round, donning a "skidoo suit" in the winter to stay warm. She also paints from two in the morning until sunrise when there's a full moon.

"I like painting in the middle of the night when the rest of the world is asleep and you hear all those night sounds," she says.

Hepburn works primarily in oil, pastel, and graphite and she likes to work large scale.

"You can really go into the painting, the dynamics of physicality," she says.

Art critic and author Nouritza Matossian aptly describes Hepburn's journey as an artist in the introduction to the exhibition catalogue:

"In Joan's work we have the culmination of a lifelong engagement which has taken her to the summit. She is unique among American artists and is a 'maestra de los maestros.' I look at her new work and I am no longer struck by the thought that Joan the wood sprite has become nature; in her compelling, towering canvases nature has become Joan Levy Hepburn."

Land Alive is on exhibit at Union Railroad Station, 35 Water Street, New London, through Oct. 13. The show is on view at the TSETSE Gallery, 190 State Street, New London, until Sept. 11. It moves to the gallery's Providence, Rhode Island, location on Sept. 17.

The TSETSE Gallery is a non-profit that increases access to the arts for challenged children by providing enrichment programs. In keeping with the gallery's mission, Hepburn has partnered with TSETSE to create the Joan Levy Hepburn Art Scholarship Fund, providing art scholarships for children in need in Connecticut and Rhode Island. Direct donations and the net proceeds of art sales from the exhibition will go to the fund.

For more information, call the gallery at 840-447-2447 or visis the TSETSE website.