Boston Art: Claire Van Vliet’s Pulp Paintings at Boston Athenaeum

Sometimes you can stumble across a real gem of an art exhibit completely by accident. That happened a few years back in Paris, when I first encountered the work of Finish landscape painter Akseli Gallen-Kallela after wandering by the Musée Jacquemart-André on the way back to our Airbnb. I fell in love with his work, and was amazed he wasn’t better known outside of the Nordic countries. Last week, I needed a quiet place to sit and read before my train home to Maine, so I stopped by the Boston Athenaeum. They had an exhibit of truly exquisite art by Claire Van Vliet, and it was fascinating to learn about both a new (to me) medium and artist. Most of her paintings on display are created using pigmented paper pulp as a medium; the pigment is embedded in the layers of pulp, rather than applied to the paper’s surface. The exhibit also includes sculptural pieces and handmade books.

Storm Clouds and Pulp Paintings

The pulp paintings have the soft, luminous glow of watercolor paintings, with heightened atmospheric effects and depth of color. Van Vliet’s cloud paintings are particularly powerful. In writing about her choice of medium, she wrote: “I know of no other way of achieving the ‘now you see it, now you don’t’ subtlety in the transitions….The colors emanate and the fibers float.”  

Claire Van Vliet, Storm Clouds, 1993 (top image), Midi/ Noon, 1997 (bottom left) and Aura,  1977

Much of Van Vliet’s work on display was inspired by, and incorporates, poetry by Rita Dove, Denise Levertov, and others. Aura, thought to be the first book illustration made from pigmented pulp, was inspired by the poetry of Hayden Carruth. The accordion-like structure, which expands to about four feet in length, showcases Van Vliet’s love for the rolling Green Mountains of Vermont, where she has lived since the late 1960s. She created the painting by layering 12 pigmented paper pulps onto a paper mold, building the image within the paper itself.

Aura is essentially a time-lapse image of a color-filled autumn day in Vermont. The left side of the folded book opens with the red “maple brightness” against a brilliant blue sky; the right side closes with the lavender light behind the mountain as the sun sets.

Aura, 1977, a collaborative poem and painting by Clair Van Vliet and Hayden Carruth

Aura, by Hayden Carruth (partial poem)

All day the mountain

flared in blue

September air.

The valley lay stunned

by color,

autumn’s maple-brightness.

Now twilight comes,

not dark but a moment’s

clarity, so that brute

wonder drains

from my eyes, relieved

by the evening star,

there, calm, over

the horizon, a lucidity,

a lucency. That light, far

lavender, restores

distance

and measure. 

Circle of Wisdom

Another poetry-inspired 3D piece, titled Circulus sapientiae = Circle of Wisdom, consists of relief prints, pulp paintings, and cut paper pop-ups, folded into a circle. This painting was inspired by the writings of the medieval abbess Hildegard von Bingen, with the accompanying text written in Medieval Latin. (So the words were totally lost on me, although I certainly admired the visual beauty of this piece.) One critic, per the Athenaeum, characterized this piece as “a book of fervent hope.”

Claire Van Vliet, Circle of Wisdom, 2001

Rock Paintings

Van Vliet loves drawing and painting rock formations. She said in a 2006 article by Bob Bahr that: “Drawing rocks gives you a really good excuse to make a picture that is just pure form, without a literal history. When I start, the form catches my imagination — the shape of the rock is what catches my eye. I’m not looking for anything specific. That’s why I like to work with something abstract like a rock. I’m just looking, seeing.” After winning a MacArthur grant, she used some of her reward money to visit  Ghost Mesa and other prominent rock formations in Abiquiu, New Mexico, that inspired Georgia O’Keeffe. A more recent Abiquiu painting, from 1993, greets visitors as they enter the exhibit.

Claire Van Vliet, Abiquiu Blue, 1993, Plate lithograph on pulp painting with hand coloring and drawing. 

Other travel adventures led her to depict the unusual boulders in Moeraki, New Zealand., and Capitol Reef in Utah, among many other rock portraits. And she found inspiration close to home in the glacial rock formations, particularly Wheeler Rock, near Lake Willoughby, Vermont’s deepest lake.  Wheeler Rock is a whaleback mountain, an elongated knob with the surface rubbed smooth by the grinding and polishing of glacial ice. These curved formations often resemble whales, with the upstream side more rounded and the downstream side having a steep drop. Whalebacks appear very different depending on the angle you are viewing them from. The differing perspectives led Van Vliet to create a sizeable body of prints, drawings, and paintings titled Toward Ninety-Nine Views of Wheeler Mountain.

Claire Van Vliet, Wheeler Rocks, 1990/2004, intaglio on pulp painting, with additional drawing

Van Vliet was born in Ottawa in 1933, and spent many childhood summers in the northern wilderness of Lake of the Woods. She moved to southern California to live with an aunt when she was 14, after both of her parents had passed away. Whip smart, she finished high school at 15, and then earned an undergraduate degree in three years. After getting an MFA from Claremont, she founded Janus Press in San Diego in 1955. She earned a MacArthur “genius grant” in 1989. Janus Press, which focused on innovative book formats and structures such as those on display here, later moved to Vermont with Van Vliet. Janus has published collaborative books by contemporary artists and writers including Raymond Carver, Seamus Heaney, and Tess Gallagher. It is fitting that this exhibit is hosted by the Boston Athenaeum, one of the country’s oldest libraries, which has an extensive lending library as well as over 100,000 rare books and manuscripts.  If you live in the Boston area, there are several docent-led tours of this wonderful little exhibit on their event calendar for October. I am hoping to make it to one myself!

The exhibit runs through December 30th, 2024.

See prior art reviews here:

https://www.marciacrumleyart.com/blog/maine-art-review-lynne-drexler-at-the-farnsworth