Mention American Abstract Expressionism, and most people immediately think of the 1940s and ’50s, first-generation Ab Ex artists Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, or the co- emergent Color Field painters who included Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still and Barnett Newman. Those early collisions of fantasy and reality - butterflies and friends, sheep and tubas - finally resolve into Welliver’s full, final embrace of plangent nature, as source and solace.' The fading memory of those manicured lawns of suburban academia - Manet-like picnics on the grass with fellow faculty accompanied by nude models, dogs, sheep, and general dissonance - eventually yield to the randomness of nature for its own sake on its own terms. In W elliver’ s mature, monumental paintings of Maine’s northern forests and streams we see a new kind of painting where surface han- dling, painterly gesture, and subject - unruly nature - seamlessly merge and quietly coalesce. In the late landscapes, for which he is best known, the seem- ing slapdash urgency of these early paintings dis- sipates into something new, vital, and central to the artist’ s being.

The ravenous, raucous, uncontained early works ricochet between abstraction and realism. 'The early paintings mark the transformative, if not to say slow, awakening of Welliver’s own work.

Slapdash scott mal