John Riepenhoff “Outside”
Marlborough Broome Street
This event has ended.
Wisconsin has a longstanding relationship with naturalists. Aldo Leopold, John Muir, Audubon and the poet Antler have all made their home here, to wonder upon the ecological richness of our Upper Midwest. Noted hunters like Ernest Hemingway and Jim Harrison (who are also known for other arts) have famously plied the woodlands of Wisconsin’s promontory neighbor (Upper Michigan, or in the local vernacular, the ‘U.P.’), seeking zones where it’s still possible to commune with the genuinely mysterious, unanswerable qualities of the woodlands. John Riepenhoff joins this list, though coming at things from a somewhat different angle. No doubt influenced by his father Bob, who for the better part of his life was the outdoors columnist for Milwaukee’s daily newspaper, Riepenhoff saw his family’s northerly-situated cabin as an ideal spot to make art. On a clear night in 2010, he revived his old penchant for painting en plein air, and set up an outdoor studio underneath the blanket of stars, which crowd the night skies here far from the consuming glow of cities. The ensuing process intrigued him as much as the end results: he literally could not see what he was doing, but for a tiny light on his tools to make sure he was grabbing a paint brush rather than a garter snake. In conditions of darkness the eye’s rods and cones translate color into grey tones, and in turn, the upper atmosphere causes distant stars and galaxies to read as colors, usually red or blue if not the standard bright yellow, and as ‘twinkling’ or pulsating
Media
Schedule
from January 05, 2014 to February 09, 2014