Art Institute of Chicago

Back of Hatchet

Neil Welliver

1978

Attribution

Neil Welliver American, 1929-2005

Medium

Oil on canvas

Physical dimensions

243.9 × 304.8 cm (96 × 120 in.)

Credit line

Gift of Maureen and Edward B. Smith, Jr.

From the museum

Neil Welliver, best known for his dynamic large-scale paintings inspired by the woods near his home in Maine, was one of the leading American landscape painters of his generation. Welliver worked directly from nature, making sketches or small paintings. Back in the studio he quickly translated these to canvas, often improvising the color palette as he painted. His works are notable for their ability to combine two seemingly divergent styles: Abstract Expressionism and Realism. Following in the tradition of the Hudson River School painters, Welliver was singularly focused on a specific region. His nearly 40-year examination of the forests, streams, riverbeds and wildlife in and around Lincolnville produced a body of work that was surprisingly intimate given the grandeur of the subject matter. Welliver’s all-over Modernist approach to composition is evident in works like Back of Hatchet (1978), in which a tangle of twigs and foliage fill in the spaces between dynamic verticals, creating a Pollock-like pictorial space that extends beyond the edge of the canvas. The painting also demonstrates Welliver’s ability to capture the unique quality of Maine’s northern light. The crispness of the icy blue sky is deftly echoed in the blue hue that appears in the shadows on the snow. The painting’s bleak, wintry tone, achieved with a relatively restrained but coolly opulent palette, exemplifies the way in which Welliver’s works reach, as critic Robert Hughes once wrote, “an emotional intensity that goes beyond the ordinary limits of realism.”

Description: Art Institute of Chicago · CC BY 4.0