These are the music of meet resignation; these

The responsive, still sustaining pomps for you

To magnify, if in that drifting waste

You are to be accompanied by more

Than mute bare splendors of the sun and moon.

--Wallace Stevens

“Of the Manner of Addressing Clouds”


Pamela Waldroup’s deeply genuine series of forty photographs in this sylvan show, provocatively titled Life Validated and Unveiled, reminds us of what art should and can do. That is asking a great deal of a summer exhibition, but there is more here than meets the eye, just as Waldroup’s local landscape is more than just a motif. The artist herself raises a cautionary finger in her personal statement for the occasion (essential reading for the comprehension of the many levels of significance in this project) citing a favorite quote from that canonic wanderer in the woods, Henry David Thoreau: "The question is not what you look at, but what you see." The modesty of the details that Waldroup forages from the shadows of the arboretum belies their larger significance, that “validation” she slips into the title. The work as a whole is her timely gift, an aesthetic offering that prompts us to think about art and its manner of addressing nature.

To place this work in context, offering a frame both artistically and historically, I tap a lifetime living on the Island and decades studying the metamorphosis of the idea of realism in art. One of the paltry advantages of being so damn old is my vivid recollection both of a greener Island and of a reference archive that springs into bloom when a new individual talent summons comparisons with the greats from the tradition. As my mind’s eye leaned into the sun-streaked path in Against the Wind, fixing forever one of nature’s more fleeting effects (dappled sunlight filtered through flickering leaves, as transient as

                            

the sunlight skimming waves on Connetquot River and Nicoll Bau nearby). This motif triggers a neural network of allusions in my musty old brain, from the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins (“Pied Beauty” and “dappled things”) to the shimmering almond trees on Provencal hillsides in Cezanne’s watercolors.

The delicate linear language of Waldroup’s Fog and Trees with Stump connects directly into photographs by the little-known Eugene Cuvelier (1830-1875) made in the forest of Fontainebleau starting in 1856 when he married the daughter of the local innkeeper who

                                            

rented rooms to the Barbizon school painters, such as Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and Charles-Francois Daubigny, as they blazed a trail in those 42,000 acres dense with oak, elm and birch for the Impressionists, who literally followed in their footsteps in that landscape. Back in 1995 (is it really that long ago?) the Metropolitan Museum mounted a scholarly solo exhibition of Cuvelier’s work, and since then I have hung one of his prints next to an etching form almost the same spot by Daubigny, a reminder of the comforting affinity between painting and photography en plein air. Like Cuvelier and Corot, Waldroup is a master of the atmospheric moment, as a long look at her picturesque Fog and Trees with Stump, one of the highlights for me of this show, vividly attests. The other connection between her exquisite works in this series and the nearly forgotten forebears Cuvelier and the Barbizon painters is the meticulous attention that Cuvelier and Waldroup paid to the craft of printing. Because Cuvelier produced so few prints, some using albumen and others on salted papers, their physical resemblance to Waldroup on the surface, all the more striking under a loupe, matches their compositional similarity. The attention to craft is the secret. It is no coincidence that I often meet her in the company of that generous, gentle genius Dan Welden, who has imprinted upon Waldroup and many generations of artists globally (Waldroup studied with him Italy, for instance) who work on paper his technical path to creative breakthroughs. I adore the way Waldroup, a gifted teacher with over three decades in the classroom, recollects his teaching and the importance of her hours in the print studio to her work:

While a graduate student in Stan Brodsky's figure drawing classes, I was also burning the midnight oil in the CW Post print shop (ran by Richard Mills at that time) using a photo silk screen process to print images of my drawings on top of larger drawings. I first studied with Dan Welden at the master’s in art workshop at Southampton. What an experience! Along with Dan, Eric Fischl and Larry Rivers were just a few of the notable artists who were part of the program. Dan's emphasis on letting the work guide you first influenced me during the Southampton workshop when I began to interpret my figure drawings as a series of large monoprints using Conte and Createx pigments on Reeves and Strathmore papers.  Years later, a month-long Dan Welden workshop in Florence led me to dissect photographic portraits and reinvent them as solarplate etchings to create multiple prints. Again, the call to let the work unfold, to be present, had a powerful influence in the studio. The resulting images and Dan's work ethic made a lasting impression. The demands of being a full-time art educator teaching both darkroom and digital photography, as well as fine art studio classes, influenced how I continued to be prolific in creating my own work during my entire teaching career. My passion for photographing, drawing, creating prints never lessened. I brought the aesthetic achieved by solarplate etching to a digital process that involves using my camera, a computer, and a large format printer and diverse fine art papers to achieve the look of a traditional print.  

At the further risk of incurring eye rolls for my “academic” enthusiasms (the current retrograde trend to middlebrow curatorial shallowness is a grave disservice to artists of Waldroup’s caliber and an insult to those who love art ) allow me to add another obscure historic reference that just happens to be precisely contemporaneous, to the year, with Cuvelier. In Vienna at the Staatsdruckerei (Imperial Printing Office), a master printmaker named Alois Auer, working side-by-side with botanists and geologists, invented an ambitious method and launched a massive project to print directly from natural sources including flowering plants, ferns, agates and even a meteor. These nature prints using soft lead or pewter plates and electrotype, in German called Naturselbstdruck, were praised by scientists for eliminating the distortion of the fallible human hand, almost upending the vast publishing industry devoted to botanical illustration. They would park comfortably as companion pieces alongside such Waldroup prints as Two Artichokes and Ferns. An earlier lithographic technique was pioneered in France by Charles d’Aiguiebelle, which he published under the intriguing title Homographies because they precisely matched to scale the objects from which they were printed. Some of the nature prints of Auer and

                                        

d’Aiguiebelle look remarkably like Waldroup’s Cypress Knee Dissected in the current show. The nature printers considered photographers to be rivals, and the two methods, born at the same moment and sharing many scientific principles (physics, chemistry, biology) although the frontispiece of Auer’s treatise, which features portraits of Durer and Gutenberg, is crowned by an allegory featuring Nature Printing and Photography shaking hands in the clouds overhead, a parity that we can ascribe to Waldroup, who taps that marvelous directness between nature and its image in such compelling works as Two Artichokes and Ferns. As with the match between natural sources and the homographies (homo indicates identical matching), Waldroup glides easily into that distinguished tradition of the artist holding a mirror up to nature.

                            

I always thought, looking at the clouds overhead, that Alfred Stieglitz was over-reaching when he brazenly titled his photographs of clouds Equivalents (“Songs of the Sky” seems more lyrical and modest), but it is not blasphemy to admit that I have looked up and seen the brushstrokes of Willem de Kooning streaking the azure East End sky on occasion. Whether we look at Waldroup or Stieglitz, Cuvelier or Vermeer (to pick a particularly brilliant example of the ‘’truthful” representation of the real world), the issue is the old question of mimesis. Here I go again. One of the many drawbacks of being so damn old is this tiresome recourse to classic models of interpretation, in this case the great literary study by Eric Auerbach titled Mimesis (1946) and its upstart reconsideration by the Shakespearian, A.D. Nuttall, titled A New Mimesis (1983) to which I refer the reader for brilliant insights on one of the great issues not just in art but literature as well, and photography inserts itself directly in its core. Photographers like Waldroup are inherently mimetic, but in that broader sense of testing (attempting, trying, wooing) our perception of the world by reflecting reality by artifice. Along these lines, I take at face value Waldroup’s use of “Unveiled” in the exhibition title. The image of the Imperial Staircase at the Manor House gave me a good chuckle, bringing back a valuable lesson that “my” docents delivered during a photography survey at the museum where six of Waldroup’s

                                          

ingeniously angled images of the museum’s own winding stair were strategically deployed on the second floor, after the visitors had climbed those steps. The daily joke was on me, because when I first saw the work as a juror for the East End Arts Gallery in Riverhead Waldroup asked me if I recognized the place and, despite running up and down those steps more than twenty times a day on average, I hadn’t a clue. Guffaws ensued, and still echo when the two of us recall this. I retell this amusing if demeaning anecdote because it points to one of the strengths not only of this exhibition but of the artist’s work in general, its deft penchant for “defamiliarizing” the subject (I shall spare you the canned lecture on the literary criticism of Viktor Shklovsky, who coined the term). I love this double take for its Socratic effectiveness, knowing full well that Waldroup was a master teacher for more than three decades in the classroom. In the artist’s own words:

I use my camera to reveal to others the details I find in everyday subjects that often go unobserved. The photographs on exhibit in Life Validated and Unveiled capture interactions between human, environmental and industrial elements through a geometric approach found in the repetitive patterns and shapes frequently appearing in my images. Exaggerated angles of view and juxtaposition of serendipitously placed elements combine with moody, sometimes dramatic light to leave the viewer with a sense of a presence unseen but felt.

This message is vital. The miserably curt attention span of museum and gallery visitors, shrinking as we speak thanks to puddle-deep dealers and curators hooked on social media selfie bait, makes a challenge like Waldroup’s injunction to observe more attentively all the more valuable, holding the line against this pathetic regression into instantaneity by challenging the viewer to puzzle out the gestalt. You see this particularly in her voluptuous Torso, a botanical study dressed (or undressed) as a life study, reminding me of Cabbage Leaf, a masterwork by Edward Weston, created in 1931, that was in the same photography survey at the museum.

                                          

Along the lines of this notion of holding the fort, returning to my idealistic hope (fading under the weight of recent experience) that art can accomplish certain good, let us now praise Waldroup’s way of helping us think about our changing environment. As a native specimen myself, for me every gorgeous photograph of a tree on Long Island is, lamentably, an elegy. But the artist herself raises a cautionary finger about categorizing her as a “landscape photographer” and I learned a great lesson from her about not stuffing her work into a familiar box labeled with that agenda. I initially wanted to compare her to Ansel Adams whose role in the preservation of Big Sur, Yosemite and Kings Canyon national parks is legendary, or the Hudson River School artists. She corrected me and her intentions take priority, even as they invaluably take us deeper into her process:

I am not a landscape photographer, and while I am deeply concerned about the plight of our earth, that concern is not the primary focus of my work. My emphasis is on the underlying abstract geometric structure of subjects. It’s about photographing with the intention of provoking the viewer to more fully investigate and appreciate the inherent beauty in nature and in architectural forms. I use digital processes to recreate the appearance of a “straight” photograph that could have been produced in a darkroom.

As you can see, Waldroup is a master of the double take by design. One of the great double takes in literature, William Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” contrasts the rural past and urban present in the course of an urgent plea to revere nature as the sole hope for redemption:

For I have learned

To look on nature, not as in the hour

Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes

The still sad music of humanity,

Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power

To chasten and subdue.—And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still

A lover of the meadows and the woods

And mountains; and of all that we behold

From this green earth; of all the mighty world

Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create,

And what perceive; well pleased to recognise

In nature and the language of the sense

The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,

The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul

Of all my moral being.


This is personal for me, not just because Pamela Waldroup is my friend but because her Walden is my home. I grew up on the North Shore, when that Edenic “fresh green breast of the new world” glimpsed on the final page of The Great Gatsby was already being despoiled by the disgraceful blight of the strip mall (Jericho Turnpike was a miles-long eyesore even when I was a child centuries ago). When I was briefly the steward of a 145-acre preserve I was rabidly outspoken (and so unpopular in my anti-corruption campaign I was run out of town) in my determination to stave off a greedy real estate grab by those who value dollars over beauty. Let’s conclude with a rejoinder to W.H. Auden, who (I think ironically) wrote, “Poetry makes nothing happen.” Thought and action do sometimes conspire, despite what Hamlet or Auden might say. Waldroup offers us a marvelous addition to the tradition of landscape elegies, not just in art but literature. These works enjoin us to do something important: Think twice.

Charles A. Riley II, PhD
Cutchogue
June 2025

Charles Allen Riley II, PhD is an internationally known curator, professor (at Clarkson University), author (47 books, including the forthcoming Picasso in a New Light and a study of ethics in the art world) and former museum director. He has curated exhibitions in museums and galleries in Beijing, Taiwan, Berlin, Amsterdam, Lausanne and throughout the New York area. He lives in Cutchogue.