Robin Durant Feild

Mr. Feild pointed to the corner of his living room overlooking Garden Street where he had composed all the watercolors now collected in the show. "The English Lakes in Sunshine and Shadow" at Hilles Library. He had set his desk between the window ledge supporting blooming begonias and the bookcase containing his leather-bound embossed sets of Blake and Turner prints, Economically equipped with half-a-dozen paints, water and one brush, he had had a gorgeous time. At 78, he had laid a lifetime of artistic training and personal experience to harvest creating what he calls "my little pictures." However harmless Mr. Feild thinks his watercolors, there is nothing insipid about their author. He possesses an enviable impressionability and gentle wonder. Most aspects of "the adventure of living" absorb Mr. Feild, and he has no hesitation to speak a piece of his mind.

Mr. Feild would like to think his watercolors romantic. His exhibit represents an evocation of a mood and feeling for a region he first visited in childhood and to which he is strongly attached. Nostalgic experience, the longing "to paint myself back into a dreamworld," is a partial motivation. This accounts for an occasional sentimentality in certain pictures. (Appropriate sentiment, Mr. Feild believes, and not in self-defense, is "terribly rare.")

Sky. lakes, and mountains, viewed in alternating perspectives, in a variety of sunlight and shadow, during different hours of the day, are his subjects, and these basic elements offer nearly limitless possibilities for orchestration. Controlling the placement of the terms ("taking hills, put them together, cutting out a piece of water,") is the aim of providing visual enjoyment. In order to be able to impart pleasure, the picture must be structured, and structured to be decorative. Mr. Feild's fond sensitivity experiments with the swift change in atmosphere characteristic of the Lake District and the effect this tension between light and shadow has on a landscape's face. Predicating this freedom "to play and monkey around" is an ideological commitment to discipline, to being accountable first for a viewer's satisfaction.

The artistic vision animating the series does not smack of modernity. The interplay between memory and imagination has removed the landscapes to a plane somewhere between the actual and the ideal. The pictures do not record fact--what the Lake Country really looks like--but rather the sense of mystery and wonder it produces. Mr. Feild has hewn every element in the vista to its most essential aspect. In this manner, the side of a cliff is painted as color emboldened by light; his nature is composed of remarkable harmonies. A spiritual sympathy for the Oriental arrangement of space lends the pictures a vast, almost mythic composure. His attempt to create atmosphere is in both the tradition of English watercolors and Oriental landscape painting.

Out of personal principle, Mr. Feild has never before exhibited his work. The "market-place" aspect of the fine arts he calls "menacing" and "an ultimate racket like the Mafia or patent medicine." The idea of arranging a business contract between artist, dealer and buyer offends Mr. Feild ("how can you price intrinsic value?"). A lifelong socialist, Mr. Feild maintains the ancient craft of picture-making is nearly impossible in a capitalist economy, which judges all objects on utilitarian standards.

The incredibly successful phenomenon of Andrew Wyeth, "an indifferent painter" exemplifies to Mr. Feild the public ignorance. With "no sense for color or pattern." Wyeth has grown rich on a "trick idea --that of recalling the old America." "He knows that if he painted a terrible tumble-down outhouse with a broken toilet seat and called it 'Those Were the Days' people would break down and sob before it."

By eliminating human life in his watercolors, Mr. Feild assured no contamination of the natural beauty by an ideological or social content. But the artist himself is a vehement social critic, a non-conformist who has often been considered "a rather dangerous sort of communist." The Aleutian bomb, contemporary art, the environmental crisis, the Indochina war indicate to him a social insanity.

Two periods of training in Mr. Feild's career were incorporated in his exhibit. As his first job in America upon return from fighting in World War I and studying art in Paris at the Julian Academy, he was apprenticed to a Boston stainglass maker. Light in one of Mr. Feild's living room windows shines through a round stainglass of St. Francis, a gift of his employer. His sensitivity to light and color were further enhanced at the Disney studios in the late 1930s. Mr. Feild still contends animation is "the total aesthetic experience," the most "difficult art form" yet developed. Involving language, music, movement, controlled color, its potential was nearly unlimited. That in five years it developed in sophistication from "Mickey Mouse" to "Fantasia" suggested to Mr. Feild that, given 20 more years, it might have been possible to animate Dante. But the comparative economy killed animation. Like stainglass, Mr. Feild believes it will be a lost art form until our culture forgoes Mammon.

Mr. Feild is a proud possessor of one Turner landscape engraving entitled "Peat Moss of Scotland." He explains its long pedigree. Turner gave it to Ruskin who presented it to Charles Eliot Norton. From Charles Norton it passed to Denman Ross, who gave it to Arthur Pope, a noted Fogg professor and Mr. Feild's one-time boss, during the years Mr. Feild taught the principles of drawing and design at Harvard. Mr. Pope gave it to Mr. Feild, his student and colleague. It seems particularly moving and fitting that this gentle artist and teacher with an independent and fighting spirit should be the final owner of a landscape by a master he most respected.