CHUCK FORSMAN | Gray Areas

“Art has many languages. I think of mine as allegory, a tradition that includes painting with moral purpose. It allows me to explore our relationship to the natural world with intent. Engaging landscapes may be an escape for most of us, but it can also be a telling and sobering activity. The arid vistas of the American west have a brutal frankness. Little is hidden. Unless we have become desensitized, traveling here can evoke emotional whiplash, lurching between the sublime and the profane. If we pay attention, the escape is over. That’s where some of us start. Art doesn't require moral purpose to be good art, but it doesn't hurt.”

- Chuck Forsman 

Colorado artist Chuck Forsman has been continuously exploring environmental and political themes for nearly five decades, capturing national attention early on in his career. Forsman adeptly challenged art history’s pristine landscape ideal by including the signs of human encroachment and degradation in the form of highways, quarries and climactic cataclysms of flood, fire and drought. Known as a painter and expanding later to the camera lens, Forsman’s dedication to uncomfortable truthful topics has fueled his overall artistic vision and environmentalist stance. HIs often amplified, surrealist worlds belie a deep sensitivity toward landscapes that he has traveled far and wide in search of inspiration that invokes a clarion call to the fate of the Western landscape.

“Gray Areas,” Forsman’s ninth Robischon Gallery solo exhibition, presents the artist’s familiar, richly pigmented, vast views of American West grandeur with mountainous ascents and skies of tumultuous cloud formations. The mark of man, either through direct interventional reshaping of the ground itself as road cuts, parking lot striping or a hilltop housing development, or as evidence of climate change such as drought, leave no doubt about the consequences of humanity’s earthly reign. Reading the triptych of Dry Tide from left to right, the left panel shows a full body of water progressing toward drought in the right panel where the cars perched on the uplifted and vanishing shoreline find themselves at a literal dead end. A single car has followed the road to the edge of a scorched precipice that once led to the water which is now far out of reach. With an even more surrealist slant, the plowed furrows of Coyote Alley become dimensional, gathering heft and strength rising up in dark violet, seemingly animated rows dwarfing the small bulldozer that created them. Under a blazing orange sky of twisting clouds, a lone coyote prowls as if to suggest the wily predator may be capable of making the hostile and unfamiliar landscape its own when it is no longer manageable for humans.

Forsman’s animals can serve as sage sentinels, from the direct gaze of an outstretched feline in a sterile neighborhood where the parked car remains tightly covered in Cat and House, to the spritely peccary family of The Javelina’s Garden which inhabits a rocky landscape with dead, broken trees and Forsman’s often-present ravens. While also afflicted by the actions of humankind, his resourceful creatures possess adaptive qualities that serve them well. And in Border, a beloved pet unknowingly makes a political statement by urinating on a plant specimen that has miraculously emerged through a harsh crack on a barren expanse. The painting’s title adds a layer of current cultural commentary augmenting the painting’s imagery. Even as a truth-teller, Forsman has never embraced an overt photo-realistic style in his work but feels instead an empathy toward his surroundings and a kinship with allegory to symbolically speak through his surreal worlds.  

Whether it’s the landscape itself or the presence of an animal as witness, the compelling and poignant narratives told with lavish brushwork invite the viewer in for a closer look. Responsive to the demands of his sensitive and challenging subjects, Forsman’s undeniably accomplished compositions and paint-handling prevails. His uncommon palette, from rich or unexpected earthly hues with painted passages glowing in lavender or orange, enable the viewer to stand in the moment to simultaneously absorb the truth of loss while still taking in the heroic landscape that surrounds. Over the decades, it is this same generous quality and poetic connection found in all of Chuck Forsman’s work that has allowed the artist to endure and to stand today as a true voice for Nature in the West.

Chuck Forsman has a B.A. from the University of California, Davis, an M.F.A. from the University of California, Davis, and studied at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, Minnesota. The paintings and photographs of Chuck Forsman are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Denver Art Museum, Phoenix Art Museum, Wichita Art Museum, Knoxville Museum of Art, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Yellowstone Art Museum, Whitney Western Art Museum at the Buffalo Bill Center for the West, Joslyn Art Museum, Nevada Museum of Art, Marion Koogler McNay Art Institute, Colorado Historical Society, Davis Art Center, Grinnell College, and Illinois State University. A three-time recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant, Forsman’s work has been exhibited in venerable institutions including the Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina, and the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. A former professor of Fine Art at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Forsman has also exhibited at reputable, local institutions such as the Denver Art Museum, the Colorado State Capital, and the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. Forsman is the author of Western Rider: Views from a Car Window, Arrested Rivers, Along the Buddha’s River, co-created with his daughter Shannon Forsman, and Walking Magpie: On and Off the Leash. His most recent publication is Lost in Vietnam.