During the second half of the 19th century, the most popular instruction book in the library of the National Academy of Design was an 18th century edition of Leonardo’s
Treatise on Painting. Academy archives show that landscape painters signed the book out time and again. This included the deeply religious George Inness for whom landscape painting would become the complete expression of emotion. What repeatedly drew those Americans to the words of a Renaissance master? Perhaps the answer is summarized in the last of his entries on observing the seasons, painting the sun and creating atmospheric effects:

That a man ought not to trust himself, but ought to consult Nature. Whoever flatters himself that he can retain in his memory all the effects of Nature, is deceived, for our memory is not so capacious, therefore consult Nature for every thing.

Leonardo offered simple, pragmatic advice heeded by Inness and many others in both this country and Europe during that time when landscape painting became the preeminent art of the entire era. Inness listened closely, as did his Hudson River School predecessors who eagerly observed the new American wilderness with awe and painted its wonders in painstaking detail. A select few of their French counterparts working near the village of Barbizon were painting directly in the out of doors (en plein air) rather than from traditional sketches in the studio. All would have agreed with Leonardo’s description of the air, “in some parts thicker and grosser than in others…and as it rises higher, it becomes thinner and more transparent.” Constable’s oil sketches, done in the English countryside, prove at once his regard for working in the open air. And Turner, whether in Italy or the Swiss Alps, embraced the whole of what he witnessed in nature until his art became what he saw and what he felt.

John Torina heeds that same advice today. Indeed he embraces and extols the natural world around him, whether on the banks of the Mississippi, beneath the canopy of the Costa Rican rain forest or deep in the Florida Everglades. He zealously recounts the names of those whose art has informed his own, speaking with both exhilaration and reverence about the painterly qualities in Velasquez. “He gives you just enough so that you can put it together in your own mind.” He describes the sheer beauty of the brushwork in Sargent. He marvels at the strength and audaciousness of Whistler’s color and composition. And he speaks in near hushed tones about Inness, who firmly believed in a Divine presence in nature and its “power of communicating human sentiment.” The inherent basis of Torina’s art may also be characterized as the expression of his real regard for the spiritual in nature.

December Evening typifies the artist’s reverence for the sites he chooses as subjects. Here, along a backwater chute of the Mississippi, a place familiar since childhood, he finds solace where the brambles and thickets are bathed in the warm shadows of the setting sun. He carefully selects such sites to emphasize the panoramic beauty of sky and field and water at specific times of day. He works entirely in the out of doors, to preserve the purity of the visual experience and because he does not wish “to dampen the freedom and looseness of drawing and painting at the same time.”

This is romantic realism. No need for theatrical trees framing the composition or exaggerated cloud formations roiling overhead. An orange-red streak of sun is “just enough” to light the surface of the water which in turn reflects the warm tones of the earth and silvery blue of the winter skies. The viewer is drawn immediately into the deep perspective by vivid patches of ivory created light filtering through the passing clouds. Torina wants to capture the enormous concavity of sky and earth, “as the Old Masters did…creating a kind of stereophonic perception unlike the flat reality of a photograph. They allowed the left and right to breathe.”

Torina turns the tailgate of his truck into a modern day easel. He describes painting in the out of doors as “a lonely sort of painting”, but then he quickly asks, “How else would a landscape painter proceed?” His eyes are constantly drawn to the source of light, and he is blinded by its lushness. The after images sting and hide the canvas surface from sight. He may work on one or more paintings for several months, but he must work rapidly while at a site as “nature is always moving.”

In Light on Distant Shore and Early Fall, Torina paints views both east and west from Daily’s Boat Camp located on another island chute of the river near the small town of Marion, Arkansas. His brush moves easily with the rhythms of nature, from land and water to layer upon layer of clouds that carry the viewer around the bend and far beyond the confines of the canvas. Such scenes are not calculated to express the artist’s spiritual yearnings. He does not manipulate reality or concoct visions of transcendence, but his paintings do appear transcendent. His intense concentration on each subject becomes disciplined meditation, with nature providing the vehicle for his sentiment.

Much of the color in Torina’s earlier body of work is tonal, and his recent work continues to attest his mastery of the many degrees of brown and green that build up the shapes of the broad delta in paintings like Dusk. In Old River Channel and December he has ventured into a colorist mode which demonstrates his heightened sensitivity to the power of light. A tiny pool of fiery yellow in Old River Channel warms the entire flat land, parting the thinly painted winter trees to create blue-white reflections in the still, cold water. The painting brings to mind the silvery woods in the late work of Corot.

In Scarlett Summer Torina continues to employ a rich palette that fully portrays the light and heat of the Mississippi delta. His increasing interest in momentary light (here, at approximately 9:00 p.m.) in a particular place is akin to the American luminists Worthington Whittredge and John Frederick Kensett. While their art was produced in the studio and retains narrative details of waterfalls in the Catskills or rocky beaches along Rhode Island’s shores, it is moreover an art about a certain quality of light, neither a generalized light nor the fragmented mixture of impressionist light. In Torina’s work, it is a light at once evocative and descriptive, glowing in horizontal bands of clouds and giving life to the open fields. To achieve this luminosity, Torina often scumbles thin layers of dark pigment over the more saturated colors, allowing the richer hues to come through - as if the sun itself has penetrated the canvas surface. In Sunset Over the Delta, the sun’s tiny ember burns a hole through the dark trees and seems to ignite a fire across the complete upper expanse of the painting. The sky consumes all but a few discernible shadows, leaving a red velvet trough to slice its way through the wet field. In Sunrise, he places a mere speck of hot yellow precisely on the horizon; it virtually floods the center of the composition, clearing away the vaporous morning mists.

In Torina’s quiet unpopulated paintings, forms dematerialize and transmute into near ethereal experience. Yet they and the artist remain earthbound - like the tall trees in Tree Top Winds which cling to the soil while reaching to the sky for a light to define the foliage and forest floor. Stand of Trees is a verdant outdoor cathedral. Rows of stately pecan trees form a natural vault above the brilliant green of the earth below.

It is difficult to imagine that the gaggle of waist-coated landscape painters in a 19th century French drawing felt as near to nature as John Torina does today. The satirical sketch depicts the gentlemen artists rushing to claim any spot in a crowded city park not already occupied by another painter. They stumble through the trees, elbowing one another aside as spindly easel legs fly in every direction. To be sure, Torina rushes to nature, but he discovers tranquil and unpretentious places for his painterly expression of the spiritual. And he “consults nature for every thing.”

Patty Bladon
The University of Memphis