Sheridan Lord at the Parrish Art Museum - Southampton, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Art in America, Oct, 1995 by Carl Little

Sheridan Lord (1926-1994) devoted much of his painting life to rendering the landscape near his home in Sagaponack in eastern Long Island. This retrospective exhibition, "Things in Place: Landscapes and Still Lifes by Sheridan Lord," curated by Getty Museum director John Walsh, represents the artists first solo appearance. It is a seamless tribute to a painter who worked outside the mainstream contemporary--art arena.

A graduate of Yale and a student of Mauricio Lasansky, Byron Burford and others at the University of Iowa in the 1950s, Lord was for many years a teacher and administrator, notably at the Brooklyn Museum School. He didn't take up the brush full time until 1970, a year or so following his move to Long Island. One of the earliest pictures in the show, Sagaponack Landscape, October 1970 (38 by 56 inches), establishes his favored scene: farmland under a tall sky with a line of trees, barns and houses in the middle distance. Rows of cultivated earth fan out in the foreground to lead us into the view. Lord became increasingly accomplished at capturing the sweep of the fields. Hedgerows and clumps of trees and farm buildings divide the canvas into color zones and are a means for marking distance in a flat land. One thinks of the work of the Dutch painters, although Lord's light tends to be warmer--more Fairfield Porter than Ruysdael. In Landscape, July 1973, a view painted from a rise overlooking Bridgehampton, a loose phalanx of cedars seems to lean into the land. The equally impressive Landscape, Summer 1977, features a row of fenceposts--without fence--accenting a somewhat arid landscape, overhung with one of Lord's grand skies.

In the last years of his life, Lord turned to painting more immediate views; several in the show are of the artist's front and back yards. His return in the mid-1980s to painting still lifes (he had worked in this genre in the '50s) went hand in hand with this withdrawal from the landscape of the South Fork, where, as he states in Alan Gussow's 1993 book, The Artist as Native, "many, if not most, of the open panoramas have disappeared." His tabletop settings range from the loosely rendered (Still Life, Fall-Winter 1984-1985, a semi-abstract bouquet) to the highly polished (Still Life, July-December 1988, which features a gravy boat and colander).

Walsh's interview with Lord in the exhibition catalogue provides many insights into the artist's working process, including his use of a "finder," a device for framing the landscape. Lord tells his interlocutor at one point that he hopes he's dealing with certain truths: "the exactitude and what you know about it, and whether you want to use it, and why you don't." The truth, in Lord's case, is in the painting.