Landscape painting is rarely a life-endangering business, but Minnesota artist Tom Maakestad definitely took some risks preparing his current show at Groveland Gallery. He's still painting Minnesota vistas as he has for years, but from a breathtaking aerial perspective that is a breakthrough for the Marine on St. Croix artist.
Over the past year Maakestad teamed up with several avocational pilots who took him up over the Mississippi, St. Croix and Cannon rivers. They followed tributaries, dropped below the bluff line, and even glided over his parents' farm at Nerstrand. From the air he took dozens of photos that he later used as references in composing the 30-some paintings on view.
"I also had other flights up near Marine in an old Piper Cub canvas-side, where the right door could be lowered out," he explained recently. "I was hanging out the door taking pictures with probably 2,000 to 4,000 feet of air below me. It was exhilarating."
A usually grounded guy, he was surprised to find "I wasn't feeling fear hanging out of an airplane door on a strap."
The results are well worth the risks as the paintings are among the best in his career. The bird's-eye view flattens the landscape and gives a puzzle-like quality to river vistas where undulating blue channels thread among dappled green islands and below forested ridge lines. Wisconsin's bluffs often dissolve in mist and the horizon line is high or missing altogether.
In his keenly observed oil-pastels "Farm Patterns" and "Spring Valley," he injects fauvist tones — lime, chartreuse, a zip of pink, a flash of orange, a sliver of purple — into a vast panorama of summer fields and encroaching woods that dissolve into a distant haze of prairie and rain-washed sky. The clouds that scud overhead on a bright summer day fall here as soft shadows on field and forest.
Though familiar, there is a quiet grandeur to these scenes that is a bit of a wakeup call, a reminder that the world around is lush, fertile and still just shy of pristine. "Look," they say. As the show's title suggests, take "The Long View," in time, and space and life.
In the adjacent Groveland Annex, Northfield-based painter Wendell Arneson delivers an impressive set of crisp, engaging abstractions. Though nonrepresentational, they are deftly grounded in "A Sense of Place," as the show is called. That's most evident in recurrent motifs — arrows, outlines of boats and birdhouses, silhouettes of figures, outlines of heads or torsos — that flicker through layers and splashes of paint.
