Sunset Stripped

Carol Boucher, pastels, Doll-Anstadt Gallery, Burlington. Through March.

“Nine Tree Silhouettes,” by Carol Boucher

The pastel landscapes of Carol Boucher are not the usual “made in Vermont” fare. Her works certainly approach that genre, but her current exhibition, “Silhouettes, Shadows, & Reflections,” at the Doll-Anstadt Gallery is not entirely about the way light falls across the features of a particular place. Boucher is not a neo-impressionist haunting the edge of an Addison County meadow at dawn. Though a veteran of open-air painting, she writes in her artist’s statement: “I don’t paint that way anymore. Now I prefer a less literal translation of what I understand and see in the landscape. I have chosen to work on imagined landscapes…”

That’s not a revolutionary idea, and Boucher’s pastels break no new conceptual ground, but they are beautiful pictures. Her use of color is her greatest strength, and all of Boucher’s other pictorial elements seem subservient to the needs of color. Her pastel technique is absolutely textbook, so colors remain clean and the tooth of the paper keeps its integrity without being buried under layers of mud. Boucher’s compositions are also tried and true.

“Sundown Crescendo” is the portrait of an evening sky rendered in fiery colors. Beneath the sunset is a rolling green meadow along the bottom edge of the painting, crested by trees. It’s a simple idea — the sky is everything here. It shifts from yellow near the horizon, to diagonal bands of orange, red and lavender sloping downward toward the right edge. Indigo and blue erupt along the top edge of the painting.

“Late Afternoon in a Field” is a large-scale piece with more features in the landscape. A few individual trees appear against pronounced hills. The diagonal cirro-cumulus clouds are more variegated here, but the basic formula of a stunning sunset unfolding over a pasture remains.

If color is the main event, why bother with the landscape at all? Boucher seems to want her work to be accessible, but a few of her pieces — the most sophisticated in the show — come close to transcending the notion of landscape altogether. “Brief Moments with Pink Mist” has color worthy of the Symbolist painter Odilon Redon. Boucher works with a full range of purples, magenta and lavender — describing the mist as pink is like calling a symphony a song. Once again she places yellow in the sky above a row of trees, and dark greens in the foreground, but such predictable choices are overwhelmed by Boucher’s sensitive gradations of tertiary hues.

“Sunset Study in Blues” and “Soul’s Journey Home (for Cynthia)” both possess decisive gradations of value. Both works portray an expanse of water under the heavens, both of which Boucher defines with variations of light and dark. “Sunset Study in Blues” resembles a Lake Champlain scene, with islands and a distant row of mountains. Transitions of dark blues to lighter ones in the foreground give the impression of marshes, while a band of pale yellow-white hovers between horizon and clouds like a weather front moving in from the west.

Grays dominate “Soul’s Journey Home,” but a few dark-blue fingers of land move from the edges of the piece toward its central axis. The rest is just an expanse where sky and water merge. As always, Boucher places the light values along the horizon, which in this case is an unbroken straight line.

Boucher has written that working with internal landscapes rather than directly from nature “is another kind of truth.” That is the only valid truth for many painters, who would let photographers have sunsets all to themselves. Boucher is investigating a middle ground, neither wholly representational nor completely expressionistic. Where such a tour may take her is impossible to guess, but she’s creating lovely landscapes to linger in along the way.