Exhibit features Asheville oil painter’s golden-hour landscapes
Photo by Colby Rabon
“My paintings are about entering into the mystery and inviting the viewer to join me in that journey,” confides Asheville artist Deborah Squier. She learned that from her father, which she so eloquently explains in her artist’s statement, where she writes: “Growing up in New England I accompanied my father regularly on plein-air painting outings. While he wrestled with the elements on canvas, I dove headfirst into them … searching tidal caves and climbing the well-defined planes of granite masses that were deposited by retreating glaciers. … This physical connection to the landscape was my apprenticeship.”
Her dad was an acclaimed professional portraitist whose subjects included WWII General George Patton, and she followed in her father’s footsteps. (One of her commissioned watercolor portraits is of Patton’s great-grandchildren.) She started her painting career as a realist, but has since evolved in a different direction that resists categorization.
“I’m elusive when it comes to labels,” Squier acknowledges. “What motivates my painting is a passionate love and respect for the natural order of things — the mystery of life in all its manifestations. I’m painting the poetry of the earth, and I want to do a series called that. Earth is in jeopardy, and the clock is running out.”
Squier has lived in Western North Carolina for decades and used to teach environmentalism across seven mountain counties. Her enduring relationship with the Appalachian landscape was ignited by love at first sight. “I came up on the Blue Ridge Parkway and just stood there; I didn’t want to get back in the car. I had studied geology, so I knew what I was looking at. But I felt like I had been hit with a sledgehammer in the most devastatingly beautiful way. I was weak, literally trembling, while being seduced by this place.”
Squier works in oil paints and pastels, is a lover of plein-air painting, and believes that a rather magical organic alchemy takes place within the materials she uses. “You are literally rearranging matter. With oil paint, for example, you have ground pigments that are minerals from the earth and the alchemy starts there, as you mix them with linseed oil to create a different kind of matter. That’s very interesting and intriguing to me.”
Her work will be included in an upcoming group exhibit at Blue Spiral titled Dusk til Dawn. Dusk is the golden hour for photographers and painters, and Squier points out, “At my core, I am a seeker, always chasing the light and the mystery, although some people say some of my paintings are melancholy. But where there’s light, there’s shadow, and the shadow is also real.
“The creative process is sacred, and to me painting in the landscape is an act of opening up all the senses with rapt attention and taking notes in the form of shapes and colors. I want to go beyond lines and marks and into the energetic source to paint the experience I’m having. Somewhere between the direct experience and the unknowable mystery is the source of my inspiration.”
At least one voice in that wilderness comes not from nature or even a fellow painter but from music producer Rick Rubin. Co-founder of the influential hip-hop label Def Jam Records, Rubin went on to make his mark in almost every genre, working with acts ranging from Black Sabbath to Neil Diamond, the Red Hot Chili Peppers to Lana Del Ray. Squier often cites the impact of Rubin’s bestselling book of last year, The Creative Act: A Way of Being, sharing quotes such as, “‘The ability to look deeply is the root of creativity. To see past the ordinary and mundane and get to what otherwise might be invisible.’”
She pauses, contemplates, and then reveals, “I’ve never said this before, but I want to create an immersive experience with my work. When I’m painting, a lot of what ends up on the paper or canvas is really an internal body of work being extruded on that visible outer surface. Getting it there, that’s the challenge — and that’s also the reward.”
Deborah Squier, Asheville, deborahsquier.com and on IG @deborahsquierfineart. Squier is represented by Blue Spiral 1 Fine Art + Craft in Asheville (bluespiral1.com) and at Ambleside Gallery in Greensboro (amblesidearts.com). Squier joins Caleb Clark, Bill Killebrew, Inigo Navarro, Isaac Payne, Amy Putansu, Daniel Robbins, and Peggy Root in the group show Dusk Til Dawn, opening at Blue Spiral 1 on Friday, May 3 (reception 5-7pm) and running through Wednesday, June 26.