By Peter Frank

These are times that try men’s, and women’s, souls. The struggle is real, and resistance must be diligent. But can we sustain such effort without recourse to the personal, the peaceful, the natural – that is, to the very things and conditions we are trying to protect, as they protect us? To make art at this point is to rally the resistant, and to resist oneself. As such, even painting landscapes and flowers and forests and the very corners of one’s abode is a political act. 

Such activist consciousness is not new to the art world, of course. For decades the cutting edge of artmaking in the United States and many elsewheres has militated against war, racism, homophobia, and ecological stress, in the studios no less than in the streets, but also in the gardens and the woods, natural environments where feminist artists, eco-artists, queer artists, and artists of color have reasserted their creative identities. The pastoral meditations of David Hockney alone speak powerfully to the identification with nature sustaining those (even those conventionally successful) who suffer under the status quo.

Best known as a gifted entrepreneur, Andrew Modlin has contributed to his communities in dark times and bright. But by his own admission he was born an artist. Modlin has interrupted his painting several times to concentrate on his businesses and life situations; but has now succumbed once more and finally to the siren call of the canvas. And he’s diving back in on a big scale, so many of his recent works reaching six feet or more. It is not a cozy size, but it allows the viewer to enter the picture and optically ramble down the paths and through the copses and flowers. Modlin works on smaller scales as well, but at these sizes he comes closer to depicting rather than evoking the natural spaces he favors. The smaller paintings, and the drawings, portray fields and rambles out there, seen as if through a window, awaiting our visit – a visit we make in(to) the large paintings, as if through Alice’s looking-glass.

Given their pastoral focus, why do Modlin’s vibrant stylized descriptions of fields and sky seem so urgent, and still yet so inviting? Why does a rendition of a field of tulips tell us to relax at the same time that it tells us to stay alert? (Wake up and smell the flowers!) How can it give us these two seemingly contradictory directions? Because the circumstances we live under in these times demand we understand that we must inhabit these contradictions, at least until we live in peace again, and in harmony for perhaps the first time. Modlin’s paintings present us with inviting natural and agricultural spaces to inhabit, but these rustic environments are stylistically modern, even modernist. Modlin’s pictures are not veristic, not with their sharp contours and jangling, often un-natural hues. To fancy yourself walking amidst these meadows or looking out these windows, you can’t simply regard these paintings as depictions of (or, if you would, substitutes for) places. You must allow yourself to see the world as Monet saw it, as Matisse, as Milton Avery, as Klee, Kandinsky, Miro, Mondrian saw it. These landscape spaces, or landscapes like them, have been around for several mIllennia, long before there were humans to describe them; but their prehistoric endurance Invites elaboration -- blue fields, yellow leaves, red paths, and sinewy lines describing everything, coloristically accurate or not, and breaking various conventions of pictorial description.

Modlin is not trying to revolutionize or re-modernize painting. He is trying to capture the effulgent atmospheres of his journeys and equally of his home views. He records this voluble spirit with the visual tools of modernist thinking: the colors may be “wrong,” the forms may be stylized, the compositions may be simple but poised, the whole picture may seem less fussy than its real-life subject; but such re-inventiveness allows Modlin to celebrate the tropospheric phenomena that have pleased him without trying to replicate them. A true neo-modernist, Modlin shows us that less is enough. 

As a neo-modernist, particularly one following in the representational – or at least pre-abstract – models of Matisse and Picasso, Modlin has dedicated himself to a manner of painting in which the qualities of the paint itself determine the impact of the picture on the eye. That is to say, Modlin’s renditions of natural and domestic sites do not pull us in with their subject matter so much as with their colors, their forms, their compositions, and their textures. We see the paint before we see what’s painted. In other words, the paintings’ strength is in their abstract qualities even though they are not abstractions. Or are they? The European understanding of “abstraction,” a fundament upon which the premises of modern art are founded, is that if it is not realistic, it Is abstract. Impressionism is arguably realistic, but what came after is not. For all their obsession(s) with the human figure, with objects, with interior settings, with outdoor scenes, Matisse and Picasso were abstract painters. And in this regard, for all his devotion to the landscape and the household and their elements, Andrew Modlin is an abstract painter.

After almost a century and a half of abstraction, we do not need to find reference to the “real world” in a painting. A painting can move us with its palette, with its contours, with its deposition of form. A painting of someone or something or somewhere need not be regarded as such, as a “picture,” but simply as a painting. The things the painting pictures are there, to be sure, but more in the eye than on the canvas. The consensus may be that there Is a woodsy trail or field of flowers or corner of an apartment depicted. But what is fact, what is real, is the paint and the canvas, the pigment and the support, composed in a way that elicits interpretation even as it obviates explanation. You might say that Andrew Modlin paints the world, and the world paints back.  

Los Angeles

April 2025