Contributed by Sharon Butler / Few artists – even among those dedicated to the landscape – would look at a body of water and think, “OK, I’m going to spend the next 30 years painting this.” Yet, year by year, Eric Wolf has done just that, driven by a fascination with the daily transformation of water’s surface, its complementary relationship to air, its connection with people, and the peculiarly seductive power of black ink on paper. “Two Waters,” on view at Abri Mars, spans three decades of Wolf’s en plein air ink painting, which he did exclusively at two sites: a pond in Chatham, New York, and a lake in Rangeley, Maine.
Wolf’s repeated visits to the same sites echo Monet’s preoccupation with the lily pond at Giverny and Cézanne’s with Mont Sainte-Victoire. He shares their conviction that neither the landscape nor the artist is ever the same twice. And Wolf understands that water, despite its singular simplicity and familiarity, is full of incongruities. It lacks structure yet possesses awesome strength, and while it seems transparent, it remains a mystery. These qualities map onto fundamental human ones – will, self-preservation, and love, for instance. He is not the first artist, of course, to make these discoveries. But he articulates them extraordinarily well in paintings like Reflection, Two Waters, and Fog.
In rendering the earlier paintings, Wolf worked like a graphic artist, intent on capturing the structure and beauty of the natural forms. But this hard-won specificity gave way to a looser, sexier, and more fluid blend of ink mixed with water from the chosen sites. Metaphorically, he is letting the pond and the lake paint themselves. Contrast Dead Trees Hand Hollow from 2011 with Hand Hollow from 2012, which could indicate a hinge point. Over the course of thirty years, through landscape imagery and materials brimming with emotional content – see, especially, Phillips Preserve – Wolf has produced a body of work that reflects an artist continually pursuing, and learning to convey, an inner life.
“Eric Wolf: Two Waters,” Abri Mars, 53a Stanton Street, New York, NY. Through April 25, 2026.
About the author: Sharon Butler is a painter and the publisher of Two Coats of Paint.
