THE PAINTINGS OF ALYSA BENNETT

James Dickey, in his poem “The Heaven of Animals” conjures a heaven in which the animals' natural environment—whatever it is—is accentuated, and continues forever.  And, “To match them, the landscape flowers,/Outdoing, desperately/Outdoing what is required,/the richest wood, the deepest field.” Alysa Bennett's paintings give us a vision of what in one sense could be called horse heaven— intensified portraits of riderless horses, often communing with each other, sometimes alone, in motion or repose.  Or, looked at another way, the landscape, in Bennett's painterly hands, is wildly omnipresent and suffuses everything in its reach; the horses belong to it.

The landscape is southern Arizona, the horses are horses re-envisioned in that context. In the last many years, Bennett, who lives in Philadelphia, has spent a good amount of time in Arizona. The rich yellows and oranges in her paintings suggest an artist who literally has seen the light, and has been startled by it. She will paint a horse representationally, but her landscapes are rendered otherworldly, surreal. In the management of the gestalt between the two lies her brilliance.

In the foreground of “Wind-Ridden,” three horses are racing, their necks outstretched. They are reddish-orange energy machines, set against a mostly pale green background, as if the viscera of pure speed and musculature would inevitably command the eye more than any grassy reality. What I love about Bennett's composition is how she allows flecks of green to appear in the horse-focused foreground, and splashes of red to appear in among the pale green. The animals and their environment contain elements of each other. The overall implication is that in Bennett's view of nature, there's no fairness, just perhaps moments of dominance, equilibrium, shifting importance. Here, the horses dominate.

 In “Idyll,” in an interesting relaxation of both color and method, she paints two horses grazing passively beneath a stylized tree—minor characters in their landscape.  Bennett's colors soften; the oils feel like pastels. For a moment, it's tempting to think she has given in to the quiescence of this scene. But we can't stop looking at the tree, which has the haunting quality of the almost-real. Figure, rather than color, is finally what intrigues us. We're left with something that seems symbolic, bearing with it a kind of pastoral strangeness.

But more often than not, Bennett's horses take on the properties of their landscape. In “Night River,” for example, they are made ethereal or, depending on your viewpoint, ghostly, as they reflect the blues and whites of the water they're drinking from. In the gorgeous “A Long Walk Home”, the horse in the foreground seems like a new species—its hide a medley of sky, mountain, and flora.  The painting in its entirety shows what Bennett does at her sensuous best—blend the exaggerated with the subtle. This is no more evident than in “The Meeting,” in which the startling purples, pinks, and magentas that evoke the landscape in the foreground give way to two horses, unobtrusive, as if meeting clandestinely in the distance, behind which are the greens and yellows of the recognizable world.

The landscapes indeed may be flowering, outdoing what is required of them in order to be equal to the majesty of the horses. But it's probably more accurate to say that these paintings testify to a flowering in the artist, and constitute for her acts of discovery, ways of approximating—with reverence—a felt and enigmatic largeness.

                                                                        —Stephen Dunn

Stephen Dunn, author of fourteen books of poetry, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for his collection Different Hours.  He is the Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at Richard Stockton College.