The beaver dam sits in a river or pond in the foreground of this composition. In the distance, haze floats over the trees and mountains rise, echoing the shape of the beaver dam. Welliver lives on the Duck Trap River in Lincolnville, Maine, and his work is inspired by the area’s landscape of rivers, lakes, mountains, and ponds.
Except for the broad areas of the sky and hills, Welliver uses linear strokes of flat paint to define three-dimensional forms. In articulating the delicate reeds and the mass of the beaver dam, Welliver’s brushstrokes take on a calligraphic character. He uses a limited palette of cool colors, evocative of the distilled light of the Maine countryside. In most cases, his large canvases are painted from smaller studies done out of doors.
Welliver’s stated goal is to make a representational painting as fluid as abstract works with their emphatic brushstrokes. He combines the careful scrutiny of nature associated with traditional landscape painting with a painterly technique that emphasizes brushwork. On close examination, Beaver Pond is actually composed of a network of “abstract marks,” each with its specific role within the larger context of the picture.
Welliver studied at the Philadelphia Museum School, where he was trained in a strict academic watercolor tradition. He did graduate work at Yale University with abstract artists including Josef Albers and Burgoyne Diller. Although he studied with abstract artists and was interested in the active brushwork of painters such as Jackson Pollock, in the early 1960s Welliver turned to a more realistic style with landscape as his primary subject. Beaver Pond and other works by Welliver combine an interest in nature and realism with an exploration of brushwork and planes of colors that characterizes modern abstract painting.
