Nathan DiPietro salutes Grant Wood

(Below, Grant Wood, The Birthplace of Herbert Hoover, 1931, painted a year after American Gothic.)

Thanks to the Depression, Hoover was one of the most despised men in America, but not by an America First, bread-basket regionalist like Wood.

In the end, his celebrations of his region transcended it. He might have been a narrow man, but as a painter, the fine-lined, lyrical urbanity of his landscapes remains a marvel. With a paint brush in his hand, Wood had rhythm, and Wood had swing.

Within the utter control of Wood's manicured grounds is an antic spirit. If Betty Boop came out the back door of his happy Hooverville to sing on the lawn and all the trees and shrubs swayed in chorus, who would be surprised?

Artists honor the past by improvising on it in the present. Currently at Punch Gallery are Nathan DiPietro's small paintings in a series titled, Neo-Suburban Palouse, an exploration of Wood's duality painted in the round on egg tempera on panel.

The fantasy maple oak on Wood's lower left has an echo in the fantasy maple on DePietro's DiPietro's lower right, a painting titled as a tip off, After the Birthplace of Herbert. Wood's trees have a lollipop sensibility, but DiPietro's are space ships colored like Necco Wafers. They only pretend to toe the line in rural red America.

(DiPietro detail)
"Give me liberty or give me death," said Patrick Henry. Why is it that the right who treat Henry as a saint seem to long for surveillance? Its members can't wait to knuckle under, to be vulnerable to wiretap without warrant, told what they can read, whom they can (and can't) sleep with and when they have to have children.

From the point of view of its proponents, what would a society regulated by the right look like? Wild nature would be gone, but tidy plots and man-made lakes would shine in the sun.

(Above, DiPietro's Lakeside. )

Another Wood link: Wood loved the pre-Renaissance Italian painters, especially Duccio, who modeled his mountains on rocks in his studio and populated his ground with strange little trees. There's more of the Duccio feeling in DiPietro than in Wood. It's only a matter of time before DiPietro paints Jesus in the Suburbs. Through Sept 26.