Donald Jurney was born in Rye, New York, in 1945, and was educated at Columbia University, the Pratt Institute, and the Art Students League.

He began his career, nearly thirty years ago, with a one-man show at a temporary gallery space in The Hudson House, Cold Spring, New York. A group of prescient collectors bought up the paintings at prices from fifty to two hundred dollars. Since then, through more than twenty subsequent one-man exhibitions, the reception has been the same — sold-out show after sold-out show.

Jurney’s work is firmly rooted in the great landscape tradition, stretching from Dutch 17^th century painting through the Barbizon and Hudson River Schools, to late 19^th and early 20^th century French and American impressionism. Nonetheless, one cannot mistake the evidence that his work is also informed and enlivened by the influence of modern painting. It is this union, one of timeless motif and of lively surface, that distinguishes his work from both his predecessors and his contemporaries, making his paintings very much of our time, and instantly recognizable.

Particularly in the period between 1870 and the famous 1913 Armory Show, landscape painting dominated the world of art. It engaged the viewer with contemporary views of the world while exploring the intersection between man and nature. With the arrival of modern painting this conversation was abandoned, cast aside in favor of a formalist investigation of the nature of painting itself. With few exceptions, such as the work of Fairfield Porter, landscape painting lay virtually dormant for sixty years, until the 1970’s.

At the time Jurney first began, realist work (and especially landscape painting) was considered deeply old-fashioned. Art had, apparently, progressed beyond such quaint notions.

Running counter to that belief, Jurney was committed to the view that understanding our relationship to the places around us, having ‘a conversation’ with our precarious world, was more important than ever before. He continues to believe that we grow in richness as we train ourselves to perceive the subtleties of the land, both in its timelessness and in its ever-shifting vitality. Jurney invites us to explore what Patrick Kavanagh has called “the undying difference in the corner of a field.” His paintings are a summons to celebrate the poetry of the commonplace.

Jurney’s work, like that of many of the masters he respects, begins with pencil drawings in the field. Exploring the particulars of a chosen place, he carefully records the information, which he will later need in the studio. Sometimes several years will elapse before the drawing becomes the motif for a new painting. In the studio, from his deep understanding of the vocabulary of nature, coupled with a keen sensibility and great skill, comes a painting with the indelible stamp of a certain day and hour, of a particular weather, and with a unique sense of place.

At first glimpse, his work is profoundly based in traditional landscape painting. But a closer look reveals that the tree, which we see as millions of leaves, is, in fact, a dense matrix of quite random marks, combining to give the impression of great detail. Through great economy of means, Jurney invites the viewer to enter into a compact with him, one in which the language of painting becomes as important as the subject of the picture itself. Our reward is the pleasure of a traditional realism that is refreshingly, and surprisingly, animated by the vigor of abstraction.

Donald Jurney has lived and worked in the Hudson River Valley, in England, and in the Berkshires. For a number of years, he has painted extensively in France. A recent interest has been kindled by a trip to the West of Ireland, and he has begun exploring the coastal marshes and the estuaries of Boston’s North Shore.

But wherever his travels take him, we can be sure of an invitation to come along, through his paintings, and of the chance to share his unique vision of the landscape — inspired by his unflagging enthusiasm for the remarkable world about us.

-Alex Hulse

“Deep in a verdant world”: The Pastoral Landscapes of Donald Jurney

Donald Jurney’s painted landscapes offer the viewer a soothing, silent, scenic respite from the burdens of modernity. No signs of technology or urban life mar his pastoral vision. It is a world of old European hamlets, worn wooden gates and fenced fields, red-tiled roofs, turreted barns, poplar groves, stone walls, and rocky shores. It is as if we have been transported to another time and place—and indeed, we have. As Jurney himself commented in his French notebook, “I seem to like, particularly, a glimpse of clustered farm buildings, some being used still, some abandoned, set deep in a verdant world.”

Jurney invites us, often literally with a bridge or pathway, to enter deep into a verdant world whether of France’s bucolic countryside or the terrain traversed by the Housatonic as it courses through the Berkshires and the lush fields of Connecticut. He even places us alone on the Massachusetts shore amidst sea, snow, sand, and rocks as if we are its very first inhabitants.

As we gaze at the painted scene before us, however, we note the signs of artistic orchestration. Both A Sunlit Cove and The Close of Day offer in their distances white sails, but they act more as visual reiterations of white surf than as indicators of human activity. Dapples of orange define the red-tiled roofs in Summer in the Allier, but they also direct our eye from left to right, forming a line of orange complementing the pure sky blue barely visible on the horizon. Smudges of orange mottle the fields, shrubs, and water, leading our eye from foreground to distance and back again. As if in musical counterpoint, Jurney masterfully paints a blue line in the garden on the viewer’s left; that thin blue line connects the blue shadow on the white farm house behind it to the reflections of blue sky in the water and the peeps of blue in the surrounding trees. Incorporating the complementary colors of blue and orange as it does, Summer in the Allier could be re-titled, a la Whistler, Harmony in Blue and Orange. .

As with any coherent body of work, Jurney’s landscapes share motifs and visual effects. No humans are visibly present only records of their past activities: a stack of hay; a staked sapling; a barbed fence; a pile of wood by a blue door; a lit window. Farmhouses of stone and clapboard, furrowed fields, dirt roads, wood bridges and stone fences create geometric patterns and impose human intervention on the scenic views. This is true whether in the broad expanse of A Hamlet in the Bourbonnais or the intimate Poplars on the Loing. Puddles and streams course through fields of green, orange and yellow, reminding us that with water comes life. Blue skies mottled with clouds of white, gray, and salmon expand and contract over the widening landscape, providing subtle dramas of their own. A Snowbound Coast and The Close of Day cede color and expression to their salmon soaked skies; they take the viewers’ breath away with their bold beauty. Patches of light enliven a field, a creek, a marsh, a chimney, a church tower, or a village seemingly soaked in the darkness of night. Jurney’s paintings are ones in which observation, memory, and technique engage in a dialogue, conjuring in the viewer a sense of place and a feeling of profound tranquility.

Jurney creates a dialogue with landscape artists of the past, as well. Although his paintings are clearly his own, with their personalized brushstrokes and favored motifs, Jurney demonstrates that all good artists are schooled in art historical precedents. Born in Rye, New York and well-acquainted with the terrain and traditions of the Hudson River Valley and mountains of New England, Jurney embraces the art of nineteenth-century American landscape painting. His gorgeous salmon and blue skies recall Sanford R Gifford, and the color, composition, and painterly strokes of his coast scenes remind one of the last paintings John F. Kensett produced on Contentment Island in 1872. September with its farmland tucked in the mountain valley and flecked paint surface reiterates the importance of George Inness in transforming landscape painting into a poetic activity; so too, does Evening in the Ile de France. A Stillness on the Housatonic, Summer in the Allier, and especially Summer in the Sologne, pay tribute to American Impressionism with its emphasis (unlike the French) on firmness of outline and highly structured compositions. Even Jurney’s painterly brushstroke possesses the same deliberateness and control of American painters like Theodore Robinson, Childe Hassam, and John Twachtman. Just as European traditions profoundly influenced American painters, so too, can one see in Jurney’s paintings the expansive seventeenth century Dutch vision of Jacob van Ruisdael (St. Martin’s Summer; A Hamlet in the Bourbonnais) and the German romantic night city views of Casper David Friedrich (A Moonlit Night; Twilight in the Nirvernais). Such recollections never force themselves on the knowledgeable viewer, but they lie in wait, adding the significance of the past to the present, and injecting the profound role memory plays in observation and creation.

Donald Jurney once referred to a day in the French countryside as “seeming, inevitably, Proustian.” The same statement could be applied to Jurney’s landscape paintings. Not painted on site but instead culled from sketches, recollections and experiences, Jurney’s paintings do not merely record nature or establish a site. Instead, through the alchemy of Jurney’s memories, musings, emotions, and brushstrokes, they unite the present to the past; they merge the objective world with subjective vision. By setting the viewer “deep in a verdant world” Jurney’s landscapes assuredly transform a place into the magical world of art.

Janice Simon
Josiah Meigs Distinguished Associate Professor of Art History
University of Georgia