Terra Incognita

By Teri Thomson Randall

The lonely pilgrim who picks his way across the barren talus field in David Linn’s paintings is both divine and human. He wages war within his soul, he weeps with sorrow, he succumbs to exhaustion, and he sees the world through imperfect eyes. Yet he is also divinely guided and inspired- a seeker, a wanderer, a prophet in search of the holy city.

When I first encountered Linn’s work, I hastily assumed that the artist was expressing an experience that was specifically male. After all, the individual featured over and over again in his paintings is a strong masculine figure, swathed from his waist down in white linen, his mysterious, dark face encircled in a halo of light.

Yet in time I realized that Linn’s paintings confront all of us- male and female- with the profound experience of our inner journey. It is not the material world Linn paints but the emotional and spiritual pilgrimage that we all make. According to Linn, we must all pick our way across the talus field, the field of life, "where stones of decision and consequence lay in uneasy balance."

In Linn’s strange land, the simplest act takes on exquisite significance. Every gesture is a prayer offered in the quest for meaning. The pilgrim stretches his hands to heaven in The Petition or rinses his eyes in a dark pool in Preparing for Sight- and somehow we feel as if the whole world has stopped and is holding its breath, waiting for the eternal consequence.

"My work is simultaneously very personal and autobiographical but also an attempt at articulating things universal," said Linn during a recent telephone interview from his home and studio in Elk Ridge, Utah, a small town at the base of the Wasatch Mountains. "What I try to articulate is what exists at the core of things. Everything you see in the painting means at least one thing, and chances are it means many things."

Linn is quickly establishing a reputation as one of the most important figurative painters of our time. In just the last three years, his work has been the subject of numerous museum exhibitions across the UnitedStates. His paintings have also been included in some landmark shows. Such as Representing Representation- one of the finest exhibitions of representative artwork in the country- at the Arnot Museum of Art in Elmira, NY.

His latest show at Turner Carroll Gallery titled The Unseen Ceremony, is his only scheduled show outside a museum in all of 2003.

Linn had been exploring emotional and spiritual themes in his work for many years before he realized that he neded to sacrifice color. Now, his simplified palette consists only of shades of sepia. "Around the middle of graduate school, I was still immersed in color- deep, rich color," he said. "But I found that combining the colors with the imagery I was creating was generating a disconnect. The color creates a connection to the real world, while the monochromatic environment separates it a few steps."

It was difficult for the artist to give up color at first, but it eventually became a relief. "Color carries psychological power, and to abandon that was a risky thing," he said. "But I came to realize that I actually see things monochromatically- not physiologically, of course, but psychologically, emotionally, spiritually. The relationships between objects, and between objects and the environment, exist within me in a colorless world. Color for me is a veneer; it exists only on the surface of things."

Today, when Linn buys oil paint, he buys only white and burnt umber. He has become a connoisseur of burnt umber, understanding and working with the subtle differences in warmth and coolness between various brands.

"I am single-handedly sustaining the burnt-umber industry," he said with a laugh.

Linn’s choice of palette complements the sort of imperfectly lit, murky atmosphere in his paintings. The images are born not from dreams, but out of what the artist calls his "internal peripheral vision." If he looks at them directly, they vanish, Linn said. He has learned to gaze at his visions, his gifts from his muse, out of the corner of his eye.

Many of Linn’s paintings are nonfigurative and involve strange meteorological events. In There They Wait for Me, a cluster of plumes linger ominously over dark water. And in The Obscured Source, an unnatural, circular cloud eclipses the sun, like some miracle out of the Bible.

Linn said that his nonfigurative paintings offer a contemplative arena in which to wander, a segment of this infinite terrain. "A part of me really prefers the nonfigurative work because there is no intrusion of another person. It is a place where I can just become a player on a vast stage. I assume that it is the same for the viewer as well," he said.

Women don’t appear in Linn’s work. The artist said that whenever he has considered putting his wife into his paintings, it breaks the spell. "I only use the male figure because that is my own point of reference," Linn said. "I can’t put myself into the role of the female. It would be a detached view from my own, and would therefore lack integrity. It will take a while to internalize the experience I have with other people and make them a part of the vision."

Until then, it seems that Linn’s pilgrim is destined to travel alone. But in truth, life and our passage toward death is ultimately a solo journey. People may help us along the way, but the experiences we have, the choices we make, all happen on a personal level.

In his artist’s statement, Linn wrote, "Whether the wilderness is in the desert, in the austerity of a mountaintop, or anywhere in between, these are but metaphors for places that exist within us, for the journey is always at its core an internal one. "The immeasurable horiszon that stretches across so many of my works is not an end; the solitary mountaintop is not the destination, but is simply another station in the vast circuit we travel. It is where we all walk.