Natural beauty and the careful work of human hands — a silo, maybe, or a wooden fence — often balance each other in rural Vermont scenes. H. Keith Wagner captures this harmony in “Landscape Complexions,” his exhibition of acrylic paintings on display until March 15 at the Jackson Gallery at Town Hall Theater in Middlebury.
Wagner’s dynamically layered, abstract paintings intentionally evoke Vermont’s agrarian vistas. The artist is a founder of the landscape architecture firm Wagner Hodgson in Burlington, and the works on display, which range from impressionistic outdoor scenes to close-up, rustic renderings of boxcars, contain echoes of his background. They illustrate his fascination with the overlap between idyllic countryside and taut structure. Wagner approaches his work experimentally, drawing inspiration from abstract art and exploring the “repetition of objects, order of grids, and textures,” according to his artist’s statement.
“Lone Barn” represents Wagner’s interest in both rigid shape and ambiguous backdrops especially well. A minimalistic white barn with a simple peaked roof sits slightly off-center before a faded yellow sky. The edges of the barn are straight and exacting, and a sharply rectangular tinted gray shadow appears beneath the roof’s overhang. Its realism stands out against the more ambiguous land it sits on, rendered in a multicolored explosion of streaks that could be mistaken for a child’s finger painting.
Wagner divides most of his paintings with contrasting colors that meet at a straight horizon line one-third of the way up the canvas. He paints with strong, directional brushstrokes, going back and forth between intensely saturated colors and gentler tones. Occasional spots of thick, concentrated paint break the illusion of the picture plane — the medium is not too shy to announce that it is, well, paint.
Two trios of paintings in the exhibition show identical scenes under wildly different tempers. The first set, modestly titled “Bay 1,” “Bay 2” and “Frozen Bay,” features skies swirling with streaks of gray, white and spontaneous mustard yellow. With his dynamic brushstrokes, Wagner is clearly suggesting capricious clouds, but the rest of the composition is open to interpretation. Splotches of green sitting on the horizon line could be trees peeking up in the distance or a cluster of homes on the other side of the bay.
The second group of paintings, “Winter Meadow,” “Winter Meadow II” and “Spring Meadow,” contains compositional clues to a shared setting, but color and form give each its own ambience. The winter meadows are depicted in lighter neutrals, while the spring meadow glows in fiery orange, threatened by a darkening sky. Each piece offers a distinct perspective — looking at them is like seeing the seasons change between blinks.
The original print version of this article was headlined “In ‘Landscape Complexions,’ Natural and Human-Made Beauty Overlap”
This article appears in Mar 5-11, 2025.
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