Introduction in Waterscapes, Landscapes

Vonnegut wrote the Introduction in Waterscapes, Landscapes, which accompanied an exhibition by the artist April Gornik at the gallery of Glenn Horowitz Bookseller in East Hampton. New York from August 7 to September 20, 1999.

Summary

Lake Erie from the West Pierhead Lighthouse, Cleveland

Bill Gornik lived with his wife Carol Ann and daughter April in Cleveland, where to the east, west, and north is the "enormous pool of fresh water" called Lake Erie and to the south are "farmlands and woodlands whose deep, deep topsoil was as dark and rich as chocolate cake". He worked as an accountant for the railroad and, after his family, his main love was jazz trombone. April was sixteen when her father died while she was a junior in a Catholic high school, and Vonnegut imagines her "standing alone on the shore of Lake Erie", looking at the sky, clouds, and water that could never be taken from her. If it were in a movie, the music would be "Blue Skies" on a solo trombone. Now that he and his wife Jill Krementz have been friends with Gornik for years, he shared the image with her and "[t]he idea did not offend her".

In May 1999 Vonnegut finally visited her Soho studio, surrounded by her waterscapes and landscapes, some six by eight feet. It was like being in a surreal parkland, with places that do not exist in reality, but "have been dreamt by a person who was wide awake". The twelve small pictures for this exhibit at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller were leaning against one wall, all "free of impasto and visible brushstrokes", as well as any signs of human beings, perhaps a remembrance of "how unpopulated the world seemed to her when her father died". During her high school years, her teacher said she "was one of their best students", but were otherwise not "particularly encouraging". Perhaps she'd have gone farther with more support, at present only being favorably compared with Edward Hooper and Georgia O'Keeffe.

She originally attended the Cleveland Institute of Art, but graduated from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax. Although Vonnegut assumed she'd left because they didn't want her to paint landscapes, in fact she was then a conceptual artist who was encouraged to talk about her art a great deal. It was only later in New York, without "teachers and other students to impress", that she began to focus on landscapes. While similar to a surrealist, she also shares with the Abstract Expressionists the quality that her pictures "are about themselves and nothing else". Somehow, she always knows when a work is done. While there are many artists she admires, she can think of none who have specifically inspired "her haltingly melodic, meditative, mantra-like waterscapes and landscapes". When Vonnegut mentioned that the artist Saul Steinberg once told him that some artists respond to the history of their art while others respond to like itself, Gornik said she liked that and identified as the second kind.