Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Ralph Albert Blakelock
American; 19th-century, 20th-century
Seattle, WA: Henry Art Gallery
83%
Moonlight. c1885-1893. Oil on canvas
This is a good Blakelock, mainly because of how completely the trees congest the sky. This gives to all of the buildups of heavy paint (Blakelock's trademark) an aspect of focus and specificity which they often lack in his more open pictures. Whereas Blakelock sometimes treated the whole of his surfaces the same way — piling on the paint as much in the forests as in the swamps as in the expanses of distant clouds — here the sky, minimized by the foliage, is chromatically various but relatively flat; the trees, opposite this, are a singular brooding black, but they also possess an immense amount of literal dimension and weight. The effect is that all the corporeal energy of the painting (or, of the paint of the painting, as paint) is by the same stroke enlarged and restricted: it's as if the light from the moon that dapples the heavens is forcing itself through the canopy to press up against the very front of the picture, but then something stops it there and throttles it (the light gaining weight as it moves from back to front of the image) towards the horizon again. That this picture heavily implies its own material realness, but then represses it and buries it in the midground, is distinctly American. Impressionism lives on the surface; Blakelock is obsessed with but ultimately recoils from it. (TFS, 2026)
Rochester, NY: Memorial Art Gallery
72%
Afternoon Light. c1880-1890. Oil on canvas
This composition is almost actively undynamic, so as (it seems) not to be competing for aesthetic effect with the intensity with which Blakelock's applied his paint. This intensity is famous, and it's what makes Blakelock's name within the history of American art: his gouged, dragged, scumbled surfaces are unique. But the intensity is also limiting — Blakelock is slightly more of a curio than a master because of how superficial (literally) his canvases are. In this painting, there's too much structure the artist seems to have sacrificed in allowing himself to indulge in the heft and feel of his medium. The silhouetted wedge of trees at right, for instance, falls just a bit too softly, too readily, into the pond or grove at left. Some differentiation to the forms within the forested sections might have made this movement appear more substantial, but then again, linework would have quashed the overall atmospheric effect. This is Blakelock's double bind: his painting’s require more brawn, but any more brawn would kill their weird miasmic presence. Occasionally, though, Blakelock manages to approach structure crosswise, through that miasma. This painting is most successful where structure suggests itself despite — because of — the lack of line: in how the colors of the sky have weight but no shapes; in how the branches of the trees are cut against their bright background; in how the horizon pokes through to threaten order, but is quickly suppressed by shadows. (TFS, 2025)