Dana Oldfather’s ‘Lavender Mile’ Mixes Awe With Terror | Visual Art








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“Camouflage,” Dana Oldfather


If you’ve been following Dana Oldfather over the past few years, you’ve likely noticed that her abstract art has begun to recede, with figures and landscapes beginning to emerge. Back in 2017, she was using photographs of her family as the “skeletons” of her highly gestural abstract pieces. She would paint simple domestic scenes — usually based on images of folks working on a car or washing dishes — and then layer sumptuous color until the people underneath were mostly or completely obscured. Titles like “Foot Bridge” helped make their hidden subjects apparent. You could just make out an outline of a body amid the sinews of paint.

Lately, Oldfather has been painting landscapes. Last year she had an exhibition at Abattoir Gallery in Cleveland, Ohio, titled Violet Hour — it was a collection of paintings and drawings that drew an easy comparison to 20th-century painter Charles Burchfield’s eclectic, animated landscapes rendered in squiggly watercolor and crayon. Many of Oldfather’s vistas in Violet Hour were in that same sketchy style, and they felt summery and muggy, if a little stagnant in the heat.

This month, Oldfather presents Lavender Mile, on view at Red Arrow until July 27, and it’s clear she’s gone deeper into the woods. It’s her third solo exhibition with the gallery, and the 10 paintings, all oil on linen, are primarily landscapes inspired by photographs taken by the artist. But these aren’t places you’ve ever been. “I don’t care about reproducing something, the way it looks like,” Oldfather says, speaking with the Scene the morning before the exhibition’s opening. “I have no interest in that whatsoever. I want to say something about living through the landscape.”







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“Two Suns,” Dana Oldfather


In these scenes, diurnal and seasonal changes have compressed, and the light often transforms fantastically in a single painting. If you’ve ever experienced a total solar eclipse, you know how impossible it would be to capture that otherworldly shift, but “Two Suns” finds a way to re-create this experience with binary suns hovering over an unreal forest grove. “When you try to paint outside, light is constantly changing,” she says. “The shadows are changing colors. To make sense of it, I have to take photos and study it later.”

This atemporality is also why the act of looking at each scene feels just as important as the scene itself. We find ourselves looking up at the treetops, down at a meadow and gazing along pathways. The golden sunny orb of “Incubation” and the wintry solar corona of “Cold Clearing” could be two moments of looking up at the sky, but you may find yourself wondering whether you’re actually seeing two shimmering reflections on a pond. 

Such moments of vertigo could be perceived as a little of the old anxiety we’re used to seeing in Oldfather’s work. Her abstract paintings were all squared up, positioned dead-on, with uneasy scribbles juddering across the depth of field. But Lavender Mile doesn’t have that manic quality; rather, these are as soft as the background paintings for a classic children’s story, like the landscapes by Tyrus Wong that inspired Walt Disney’s Bambi. If anything, Oldfather’s pieces contain the frisson of getting a little lost in the woods, especially as a kid. A bit of awe mixed with terror.

Narratively speaking, the forest is often a dangerous place, or at least a place where we must keep our wits about us. Certainly, some of Oldfather’s scenes are a little eerie, such as “Camouflage,” in which three strange figures play in a forest glen that is a different color than the rest of the woods around them. The sources of light are also mysterious: The sun (or suns) has an amoebic bleed, globular dandelions burst like a lens flare, and a glow emanates from somewhere off-scene to illuminate grasses underfoot. Even the shadows are unusual, a mix of purple and green that combines to make the titular bluish lavender. “It gives brightness to a shadow,” Oldfather says. “It’s not actually darkness, it’s light!”

It’s wonderful to see Oldfather willingly venture into the surreal, a return to her earliest roots as a self-taught artist. Her pine trees are bulbous, their fronds flat, soft and dewy — more like petals than clusters of needles. Snow floats like celestial bodies under a tree’s branches, and sprigs of wild carrot appear carved out of space as if with the sharp end of a stick. The fluidity of these details is in part due to the poppy oil in her paint, which causes the paint to dry very slowly. She’s also done a red underpainting in the style of the Dutch masters, which allows a “weird vibrating hum thing” to come through.

Lavender Mile finds the artist at the height of her talent, and by using the outside world to explore her interior, she has created a space that is quite lovely. 

“I’m getting the miles in,” Oldfather says. “I’m moving across the earth, making myself knowledgeable of how vast and beautiful and bright the world is.” 



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