Michael Sastre: Recent Work, The Waterways
By Kenneth Jassie, Ph. D.
It is something of a stretch to name Michael Sastre’s recent genre of painting “landscape”. Initially, Sastre offered the term landscape to describe the artful combination of luminescent skies, swaying trees, stirring grasses, and wildflowers, with marshes, lakes, and/or rivers. Yet given that all of the images contain water in some form, it would be most appropriate to borrow the title of one of his recent exhibitions: Waterways. It is the term that best conveys the critical visual, textual, sacramental, and symbolic importance of water in the artist’s vision.
Unlike many contemporary artists, the subject of Sastre’s recent work plays a significant role, and speaks directly to his admiration and awe before natural beauty. In numerous instances, the viewer is treated to a spectacle of “pure nature”, uninterrupted by the human figure or narrative device. Upon examining Morning Marsh (2002), we marvel at the vivid colors of water and sky and the stately posture of reeds and trees. And we dimly perceive the sparse heard of cows or flock of distant birds as emissaries of higher life forms that also serve to balance the composition. On the one hand, nature appears as an enchanting and ethereal entity. Or put another way, it is a vessel from which we may drink our fill of the beguiling fantasy of an Arcadian paradise. But on the other hand, Mr. Sastre gently reminds us that nature also exists outside the human mind. Sastre is a sensitive student of his environment, taking meticulous note of colors, sounds, smells, and textures, which he then tries to incorporate into his paintings. For instance, he recognizes that compared to the strong color contrasts of his Florida scenes, the flora of the Northeast is more analogous. Therefore, in a work such as Grazing Graces (2003), he restricts his northern palette largely to different shades of green. To his way of thinking, the natural world is a place of fragile beauty that is our responsibility to protect and preserve. Ultimately in Sastre’s art, the Romanticization of nature gives way to a subtle and thoughtful environmentalism.
Yet for all of the attention directed to illuminating the sky and the earth, it is clear that water in particular constitutes the soul of his subject matter. Mr. Sastre makes the point himself remarkably in reference to the art of Lucien Freud: “I would like to do with water what [Freud] did with flesh.” This comment is both a measure of how actively he relates to his sources as well as how strongly he considers water to hold a central, partly mystical place in his art. With River Bend (2001) and Lily Waters (2002), Sastre renders the turgid water using specific and dynamic colors, shapes, and textures. Thus, short streaks of blue and white paint, surrounded but not surmounted by hazy green and other tones, serve to isolate the water portion from the rest. Intensified and duly solemnized, water receives acknowledgement as the ultimate life-generating force.
Certainly, the basic realism of the paintings has a distinctive allure. However, the most meaningful and intriguing part is the form, namely the artistic arrangement of paint, color, and light. In more ways than one, Mr. Sastre’s waterways do not represent a 21st –century return to Romanticism. The way he handles paint (or “pushes” it, to use the artist’s own words), applying it sometimes in a thick crusty manner, sometimes finely and delicately; the way he layers his composition, stacking areas of color in horizontal bands; is not like the Romantics, but strikingly modern. For example in Autumn Estuary (2001), the glowing yellow, orange, and red and the seething blue and green, layers, representing water, flowers, trees, and sky approximate Van Gogh’s expressionistic take on nature. However for the most part, Sastre’s works embody the tension of those 20th –century modernists, like Richard Diebenkorn, who juxtapose representational and non- representational elements in their art. Even a cursory glance reveals that Sastre’s natural-seeming forms are actually planes of color. Not quite as devolving as Diebenkorn’s Bay Area paintings, Sastre’s imagery does emerge firmly if uneasily in the realm of realism, as a compelling if somewhat mysterious picture of “pure nature.”
In terms of light, vivid colors mimic the effects of sunlight at different times of day. Morning Marsh (2002) portrays early and evening light with a transcendent beauty and quietude comparable to the stunning marsh scenes of American luminist Martin Heade. The overall quality of the light in Sastre’s paintings is uniform and appealing. However, as the artist freely admits, this consistency and beauty comes at the price of altering reality. Sastre expresses admiration for filmmakers’ use of artificial lighting, for instance, to metamorphose the pre-dawn darkness into midday brightness. And as a starting point for many of his paintings, he constructs a maquette, a photographic collage that combines the most desirable and artful views of water, skies, and trees. Thus upon closer inspection, the extremes of light and dark separating foreground and background, and water and sky, are not naturalistic; in other words, they do not embody a factual time of day. For that matter, the seeming undulations of flowers and trees represent the multivariate effects of the wind, but also manage to create dynamic areas of interest. Considering the form along with the content, the viewer may reach the inescapable conclusion that Sastre’s waterways are at least as much about painting as they are about trees, flowers, and water.
Sastre’s waterway paintings ultimately transcend their sources because they combine so much of the past with the present to take us to a place that is mythical as well as real. The works combine realism and abstraction, pure painting with pure nature, and visual and tactile beauty with art concepts. When Mr. Sastre completes his waterways series, then our knowledge of what is important in nature and in art relative to nature will be much increased. In so doing, Sastre will hopefully redefine his motifs in ways unimagined by Romantics and modernists alike.