Big-sky canvas

Painter Bob Ewing captures the vast Colorado plains

by Leon Nigrosh

BOB EWING: PAINTINGS AND PRINTS At Surroundings Gallery, 377 Main Street, Gardner, through September 5.

Just as he was about to set off on his artistic career, Uncle Sam plucked Bob Ewing up for a tour in Vietnam. On his way west to ship out, Ewing stopped to visit friends in Colorado. The vivid memories of the breathtaking high-plains landscapes kept him alive through the Tet Offensive in 1968. After returning to the US, Ewing settled in Loveland, Colorado, and returned to his first love -- painting.

Right now, he's back home in Gardner showing more than 40 lively landscape paintings and prints at Surroundings Gallery. When Ewing was at Mass Art, he studied painting with Lawrence Kupferman, the area's pre-eminent abstractionist. But his exposure to the grandeur of Colorado's unbridled nature forced Ewing to leave the aimless play that was abstract and concentrate on representing the realm of the concrete. And he doesn't skimp on the realism. In works like his acrylic on canvas Autumn's Passing, you can almost count every orange and yellow leaf on the stand of trees in the foreground.

For Desert Monuments, Ewing offers a panorama of the rainbow tableland festooned with monumental plateaus jutting skyward into the crystal air. In Ascending Mists, he portrays windblown craggy peaks in the foreground with Colorado's ubiquitous snow-capped purple/brown mountains hovering above a lush valley as a solitary eagle soars above it all. These are the images of Colorado as we have come to know them. Or are they?

It turns out that these vistas are all derived from Ewing's imagination. He treks to different picturesque parts of the wild Southwest and just sits there, letting the landscape overtake him. Then he returns to his studio and assembles his visions onto his canvas with a full range of color and a deft touch. Nowhere is this technique more obvious than in his dramatic image, Surging Tide, which shows the blue-green Pacific Ocean crashing against a wall of what appear to be monolithic Colorado outcroppings. Could it be that this is the apocalyptic result after the San Andreas Fault has finally done its thing?

Ewing often injects wildlife into his grand scenes. Fishing Lesson has the requisite magnificent mountains in the distance. But rather than being the center of attention, this time they frame a grizzly bear as it teaches its cub how to snatch lunch from a fast-moving stream. You can almost hear the regal elk in Autumn Call as it bellows in an orange/red field of scrub brush at the foot of the distant Rockies.

Ewing has also skillfully applied his highly detailed, colorist style of painting to an array of color offset lithographic prints. Though the prints still retain images of the indigenous mountains, streams, and forestry, many are more intimate portrayals of the frail human attempts to coexist with nature. One print, Steamboat Memories, focuses on an abandoned cabin slowly succumbing under the weight of a nonstop snowfall. In another snow-laced scene, Indian Winter, three tipis stand tall against the winter chill of the barren landscape.

Only one human image can be found in this entire exhibit. It is a brightly clad skier, leaping into the mountainous void as he shoots a mogul in the print Snowborne. In a somewhat novel manner, Ewing offers us two versions of this print. In its original state, the print is a signed, numbered imprint taken from the completed edition. The second rendition, taken from the same edition, contains a remarque -- a small original painting done by the artist in the margin -- in this case, a careening snowboarder. A second version of Indian Winter takes on a more mystical slant with Ewing's introduction of a prominently featured remarque of a bison.

Ewing said that he's not trying to tell a story through his prints and paintings but simply trying to create an atmosphere that conveys a genuine sense of visual beauty that he sees in the land around him. Encompassed by the purity of mountain nature, Ewing uses color, light, and form to put his personal "poetic experience" on canvas for others to share and possibly look then at their own surroundings in a new light.

The gallery is open Monday through Saturday from 10:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Call (978) 630-2340.