Interchurch Exhibit Covered in Gallery and Studio Magazine
Hollender: The Glory of Humility Before Nature’s
Bounty
Riverside Park looked like a big bucolic salad on the brilliant Spring day that we went to take notes on Wendy Hollender’s recent exhibition “Riverside Park and Beyond” at The Interchurch Center’s Corridor Gallery, 475 Riverside Drive. Having the Park blooming so lushly right across the street from the gallery gave one an even greater appreciation for Hollender’s meticulously rendered and annotated botanical drawings and equally detailed oils on linen– as well as for the unseen riches within the park itself; for her workdelineated the intricate variety of plant species beyond the verdant veil, so to speak.Although some works included were inspired by the flora of locales as distant as Cinque Terre, Italy, Puerto Rico, and Sea Island, Georgia, the main focus of the show was Riverside Park, since Hollender has lived in its vicinity for over twenty-five years. She began by painting landscapes there but for the past eight years has focused exclusively on botanical illustration in order, as she puts it in her artist’s statement, “to communicate my personal
experience in a work of art so that others can see as I do the uncommon beauty of a common plant.”
In an era when subjectivity and sensationalism are so prevalent, it takes uncommon humility for an artist as skillful as Hollender to subdue the interpretive impulse, eschew expressive flourishes, and subordinate her artistic vision so completely to the factual transcription of natural forms. Yet in doing so, Hollender reminded us of one of our favorite exhibitions of this past season: the splendid show of intimate landscapes in watercolor by the British visionary Samuel Palmer, a contemporary of Blake, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. For even without taking the same romantic liberties as Palmer, Hollender
manages, for all her insistence on botanical accuracy, to invest her pictures with similar intensities of feeling.
While a few were in oil on linen or watercolor, most of Hollender’s works were in colored pencil, a medium she handles with exquisite finesse. That the drawings and paintings were displayed behind glass, in window-like openings in the walls of the gallery or , in the case of some drawings, in sketchbooks
laid flat in vitrines, encouraged the viewer to study them closely and read the artist’s neatly penciled notes on the plants, which were not only informative, but added to their intimate visual appeal. Exhibited along with the drawings and paintings were actual botanical specimens, such as seeds, nuts, berries,
and dried leaves, that suggested an “installation, albeit of a more intimate, sedate, and scholarly kind than that word usually implies when used in the context of a contemporary art exhibition.
That said, the chief pleasures of Wendy Hollender’s show were aesthetic, owing to the austere beauty of her technique, portrait-like delineation of each plant’s salient characteristics and her way of making seemingly casual elements cohere compositionally. Especially pleasing was her oil on linen “Allamanda cathartica (Allamanda),” where the restraint of here style let the innate sensuality of the green leaves and yellow flowers speak for itself, and where the addition of a tiny “lubber grasshopper” (its specific species duly noted in the artist’s neat script) traversing a slender stem, added sudden animation to Hollender’s especially exacting species of still life painting.
-J. Sanders Eaton