It is not often that I am moved to write about visual art any longer, but a new show at Pittsfield’s Hotel on North has brought me to that place again. A group of recent works by Marita O’Dea Glodt awakened a passion that, in this time of self-quarantine, I had neglected. Seeing the Berkshire landscape, which I did consistently during the early months of COVID-19 from behind my closed car windows (I took a drive every afternoon from 4 to 4:30 p.m. in February and March through early April), is a pleasure that cannot be ignored or denied. This exhibit of her paintings of that visual treasure is a treasure in and of itself.
She has called this exhibition of 15 works “A Berkshire Journey” and it is just that. In her artist statement included in the exhibit she writes:
“When I began to draw and paint this collection, I was taken back to a memory of a Ralph Waldo Emerson quote that has stayed with me since I was a student.
“Wherever snow falls, or water flows, or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds, or sown with stars, wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever is danger, and awe, there is beauty.
Emerson’s words inspire me as I travel through Berkshire County to observe, listen and draw and then to return to my studio to paint. He wrote that ‘the river is a perpetual gala’ and ‘in the woods is perpetual youth’ and ‘the sky is the daily bread of the eyes.’”
She has taken Emerson very seriously in this collection, as local colors and the variables of daylight bring us close to the visuals she has sketched. Whether winter or summer, the fields and the trees reflect not just nature but our own reactions to those seasons.
In a series of sketches, we find a particular tree, its limbs barren and stretched out as if to embrace the viewer. Further down the wall is a brilliant oil painting of the same tree, still bare, still dying and still needing to hug the viewer’s emotional resources. It is one of several paintings already sold, and clearly the reason for that is the power of the work. Her technique calls out, leaving the viewer wondering about the power inherent in the tree itself. This emotional aspect is part of the painter’s art.
Technically there is something ill-wrought in these works; it feels like one more round with the brush could better complete the picture, and yet it is clearly the vision of the artist. It is finished. It is how she sees this part of her world and nothing more needs to be done or said within the painting itself. That odd sense of “something more” pervades the exhibition and its contents. You are drawn into a world that could be finished and yet, when you think about it, nothing in nature is ever actually finished. There is always one more step to go, and another after that, and this is the quality that Glodt gives to her paintings.
A “journey” is the correct way to look at this collection. If you took the Berkshire world trip through which she has meandered and saw the things she saw, when you returned to those places, they would be different, changing, self-creating yet another picture different from the one you saw on your own journey. Marita O’Dea Glodt has brought us to a moment in the evolution of nature’s own journey, and she has left us with a yearning to return again and again to see how light, air and seasonal differences will affect our appreciation of the work’s (hers and nature’s) reality.
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Water, Land & Sky: A Berkshire Journey is available to view whenever the Hotel on North lobby is open through Tuesday, Sept. 29, at 297 North St., Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Marita O’Dea Glodt may be reached through maritaglodt.com or by phone at (713) 248-6588.
