Neil Welliver, Painter Of Reinvented Landscapes, 75

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Neil Welliver, a Painter of reinvented landscapes, has died at the age
of 75.

Moss-encrusted stumps, skeletal birch trees, a charred path left in the
wake of a forest fire -- Neil Welliver's landscapes were as rugged as
the Maine forest he lived in. His large-scale paintings were so
realistic they appeared you could walk right into them.

But art authorities saw even more.

"Neil Welliver was responsible for reinventing the American landscape
in a modernist idiom," Chris Crosman, director of the Farnsworth Art
Museum in Rockland, Maine, said yesterday of Mr. Welliver, who died
Tuesday in Waldo County General Hospital in Belfast, Maine. He was 75.

Mark Strand, a former US poet laureate and a friend of Mr. Welliver,
said that the artist was pleased when people said it looked like they
could walk into his paintings. "But that's not the way he thought of
himself," Strand said. "He said he was bridging the gap between realism
and abstraction."

Mr. Welliver did not paint the popular Maine images of lighthouses,
scalded lobsters, and granite slabs descending into a pounding surf. He
chose remote blueberry barrens, disheveled beaver lodges, and other
woodland scenes near his homes in Lincolnville and on the Allagash
River in the North Woods near Canada.

Crosman described his work as "anything but pretty or comfortable."
Robert Hughes, the art critic for Time magazine, once described Mr.
Welliver's work as among the strongest images in American modern art.
His paintings sell for tens of thousands of dollars.

Mr. Welliver was born in Millville, Pennsylvania. He graduated from
Philadelphia [Pennsylvania] Museum College of Art in 1953 and Yale
College in 1955. After teaching at Yale for 10 years, he taught at the
University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Fine Arts from 1966 to
1989. From 1970 until his retirement in 1989, he commuted monthly to
Philadelphia from his farm in Lincolnville.

He was a stocky, brusk man, often with a cheek full of chewing tobacco.
He looked more like a big-game hunter than an artist. For much of his
life, he fought what he called the art world's "tyranny of
abstraction."

Mr. Welliver lugged an 80-pound pack of painting supplies into the
field. "I never use paths. I go straight into the thickets," Mr.
Welliver said in a 1996 story published in the New Orleans
Times-Picayune.

He said he sought out what he called "places of power." "If you give
yourself to a place, you begin to feel its power," he said. "For me,
these places are often nondescript corners, small things, not the big
19th-century vistas of the Hudson River School," referring to the
grandiose, romantic images of the American wilderness by Thomas Cole,
Frederic Edwin Church, and others.

Mr. Welliver's life was as tragic as his career was triumphant. In
1971, his best friend drowned in a pond in Maine. In 1975, his
farmhouse burned to the ground and much of his work went with it. In
1976, his daughter Ashley died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Six
months later, his wife, Polly, died of a viral infection. In 1991, his
20-year-old son, Eli, was murdered while studying in Thailand.

Through it all, Mr. Welliver continued to paint.

"He saw a lot of tragedy. His life was one horrible happening after
another," Strand said, describing him as a man with a lot of energy and
will power, who was opinionated and loyal. "If it had been me, I would
have gone crazy."

Mr. Welliver created larger works from his field studies, often pieces
8 feet square, under a skylight in his barn-studio.

"I have absolutely elephantine memory for what I see," he said in the
catalog of a 1996 retrospective of his art. "I even remember pine
needles and how they lie. When I'm painting big pictures in the studio,
my mind is running wild. To a certain extent you relive the experience
of nature on a greater scale and, one hopes, better."

In recent years, Mr. Welliver suffered a heart attack. He also suffered
from hydrocephalus, commonly called "water on the brain," and was
confined to a wheelchair.

But he arranged for others to enjoy his land by donating nearly 700
acres to Maine's Coastal Mountain Land Trust. Now those who felt as if
they could walk into his paintings will be able to do the next best
thing: visit the places that inspired them.

Mr. Welliver leaves his wife, Mimi Martin Welliver; three sons by his
previous marriage, Titus B. of Los Angeles, California, Ethan A. of New
York, New York, and John W. of Rockport, Maine.; three stepchildren,
and two grandchildren.

Boston Globe