Art: At Noyes, how 2 artists see the light

Let there be light, God reportedly intoned.

If only it were that simple for painters. They've been wrestling with light for centuries, trying to replicate the luminous manifestation of creation.

And if you examine the broad sweep of art history, you'll find that in the main, painters have done an impressive job of representing "light," usually with opaque pigments.

Yet their labors will never be finished, because besides being eternal, light is elusive, chameleonlike. And so painters persist in anatomizing its complexities.

A complementary pair of solo exhibitions at the Noyes Museum of Art in Oceanville, N.J., highlight this perpetual challenge through dramatic opposition of approaches.

In one gallery, Glenn Rudderow tries to re-create effects of light on, and over, water in a time-honored way that Joseph M.W. Turner would have recognized and applauded.

In another, Nancy Depew squeezes patches of light out of the penumbral gloom of deep woods. For her, light is less a glorious effusion, as it is for Rudderow, than tiny pools of attenuated energy immersed in shadow.

This conjunction of opposites is especially apt at the Noyes, which is situated in an environment saturated by light reflected off the nearby Atlantic Ocean, the marsh of the adjacent national wildlife refuge, and picturesque Lily Lake, which the museum overlooks.

So when one is considering Rudderow's work in particular, the aesthetic inspiration is always close at hand.

Likewise, Rudderow is the perfect painter to show here. Although native to Chicago, he has lived in southern New Jersey, in the environs of Delaware Bay, all his adult life. From countless painting excursions in the region, he has come to know the wetlands, woodlands, and bayside communities of Salem and Cumberland Counties intimately.

The depth of his communion with the environment he paints is effectively captured in a 2005 film called Reflections of a Bayshore Painter, which won an Emmy for NJN and its producers, Louis Presti and Jane Galetto. It's set up for viewing in the Rudderow exhibition, and worth your attention.

Rudderow, who studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, is an ambitious landscapist who tries to nail down not only the precise quality of light observed at a particular time of day but also the relative transparency of the air, which varies according to humidity.

This isn't easily achieved, and he isn't always successful. Like some artists who paint in the impressionist manner, he's prone to exaggerating warmer hues, especially orange, and the purple in shadows.

Yet one has to admire his persistence, especially given that falling short in either challenge can result in a picture that appears heavy-handed or, contrastingly, enervated.

Rudderow is partial to sunsets, and his tend to be saturated with mauve, salmon, and hazy lemon light. I have experienced such intense sunsets, but not all that often. Too many at once, which is what we have here, and cliche begins to rear its unwelcome head.

Rudderow's program is admirable, but its realization is compromised somewhat first by his choice of materials and second by the way his paintings are presented in this show.

Most of the works are oils on panel, which may be a concession to working outdoors or the fact that he paints in a wheelchair. However, this combination doesn't achieve as much delicacy and transparency as would be possible in watercolor.

We know this because the show includes eight watercolors, which are hung on projecting wing walls and easy to miss. Watercolor is a more comfortable fit with Rudderow's painting style and his aesthetic objectives, and the results - beautifully achieved, for instance, in Chinook and Crystalline - are more satisfying.

The watercolors are also framed more simply, and thus more congenially; the framing on the oils rarely flatters them. Finally, there are just too many pictures, more than 50, crammed into one room, and many are relatively small, which gives the exhibition the feel of a sidewalk sale.

Moving from Rudderow's roseate sunsets into Nancy Depew's "forest-scapes" is a bit of a jolt, like traveling from somewhere over the rainbow to Robert Frost's woods that are "lovely, dark and deep."

Depew's woodsy landscapes might remind you of those by Neil Welliver, who taught for many years at the University of Pennsylvania. He took viewers deep into second-growth Maine woods defined by dappled sunlight and tangled scrims of branches and foliage.

Depew does the same, although her woods are as crepuscular as a clothes closet. After one's eyes adjust, one can pick out trickling rivulets, stones, patches of moss, ferns, and logs, all softly bathed in light that filters through the dense canopy.

These landscapes, like Welliver's, are close-up portraits, not expansive views, but they're considerably more contemplative, like still lifes.

The dim light is exaggerated for dramatic effect, but Depew's meticulously realistic rendering of nature at its most ordinary achieves its purpose, which is to draw attention to the lyrical beauty of forest nooks and crannies.

Given that Depew lives in Plainfield, N.J., in the New York metropolitan area, one wonders where she finds such bosky hideaways.

She calls attention to them in another way, with simple, evocative titles such as Weight, Whisper, and Tangle. Her visual poetry achieves an apotheosis with Momentum, a scene of moss-covered rocks around a shallow pool that is as mysterious as it is alluring.

Depew's show also includes several oils that are more properly still lifes than landscapes, such as a single stalk of iris against a black ground, and Reminder, a blasted tree in isolation suffused in soft light. These are neatly complemented by two exquisite charcoal drawings of tree trunks in which light is deployed more evenly and naturally.

Moving from one show to the other, in either direction, provides a pointed lesson in how fundamental light is to all kinds of painting, even abstraction. Rarely will one find such strongly contrasting philosophies of how to engage light so conveniently juxtaposed.

The Glenn Rudderow exhibition continues at the Noyes Museum of Art, 733 Lily Lake Rd., Oceanville, N.J., through Sept. 4; Nancy Depew continues through Sept. 18. Hours are 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays, to 8 p.m. Thursdays, and noon to 5 Sundays. Admission is $5 general and $4 for visitors 65 and older and students with ID. Information: 609-652-8848 or www.noyesmuseum.org.

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