“I don’t have to go to Tahiti, or depict some imaginary, Surrealistic craziness,” Daniel Heidkamp said of his enplein air painting philosophy. “I could go to Greenpoint, Brooklyn — looking at the normal stuff in a way that brings the art out.” For a series of works currently on view at White Columns in New York, his focus was the leafy environs of Central Park surrounding the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (A previous series, shown in 2013 at Half Gallery, painted Greenwood Cemetery, which is close to his home and studio in Sunset Park.) Heidkamp chose these varying views of the Met for their mixture of the familiar and the slightly exotic — a huge number of people have been inside the museum, he explained, but for many, the stretches of nature surrounding it are “mysterious and unknown.” The resulting compositions are confident, with certain landscape elements rendered in a type of visual shorthand: a boulder’s dark swirl, the dashed lines of a tuft of lawn. In some canvases, the Met building looms like an angular, beached space ship; in others it’s merely one small element in the background, with Heidkamp giving equal attention to brilliant foliage, tangles of grass and brush, and the occasional human protagonists (often his wife and their infant son).
Heidkamp’s current practice of painting from life, often outdoors, arose from a decision several years ago to focus on his immediate studio surroundings: “Being in a room, and painting what’s in the room.” That has grown into a body of work that flexes oil painting’s basic muscles, and proves that landscape — a genre championed by the likes of octogenarian Wolf Kahn— still has relevance for a much younger generation of artists. “The more I experimented, the more I realized that there are certain things that are intrinsic in oil painting,” said Heidkamp, whose style has undergone subtly seismic shifts. “If you can get those — illuminate and find the secret of those things — it’s the best way. And if you can do that, you can make all the weird stuff you want.”
While he often used to work from photographs, painting en plein air has given his practice a sense of speed and urgency, with many canvases completed during a single session. “You don’t have a lot of time to correct things as you go,” he said. “It’s a call and response.” Detritus from the natural world also makes its way, quite literally, into the compositions: shards of leaves in “Dad MET,” 2014, or an actual dead fly in “Mothers’ MET,” 2014. (It landed near the painted image of Heidkamp’s son, he explained; he kept it there, and augmented it with miniature painted wings.) “It adds a sense of time and place,” he said, also noting that certain of those elements are liable to decompose or break down over time. “I like the idea that the painting changes, like nature changes.” Heidkamp plans to continue the landscape works, though he’s most likely done with the Metropolitan as a subject glimpsed from afar. He might venture to the Hamptons (“loaded with art energy and baggage”) and, despite the previous assertion about Tahiti, he hasn’t fully ruled out the romantic Gauguin option.
He’s also knee-deep in another very different series of works — some of which will be included in a group show, “Some Thoughts About Marks,” opening this Friday at Jack Hanley Gallery in New York — which depict various iterations of a character he calls “the Slugger,” a youthful, comically inept baseball player. One massive example, nearly 9 feet tall, portrays a grinning boy caught mid-run. There’s something unnerving about the dip of his knees and the angle of his stride; the Slugger here is a bit bottom-heavy, but his facial expression — a kind of dazed ecstasy — shows that he’s not overly concerned about any of this. While the paintings are technically about baseball, they’re not really about baseball at all, Heidkamp explained. The slugger is “maybe a little naïve, with this doughy face. He doesn’t know what he’s getting into. Or he’s about to be shut down by the world, but he’ll keep smiling.”
Heidkamp later realized that his most recent work has an odd connection to some of the earliest art he made as a child — drawings of sports icons from baseball cards. (As such, he actually traces the genesis of the “Slugger” works back to 1987, when he was an adolescent non-professional who answered to “Danny.”) His goal for the summer is to conscript fellow artists and other peers to dress up in baseball uniforms and pose, outdoors, as further variations on the Slugger. It’s not about athletic heroism or sporting competence, unlike when he was a kid drawing images of the game’s stars. “It has that human feeling,” Heidkamp said. “The Slugger’s an Everyman — it’s about going through life, slugging it out, with humor and perseverance. I’m not going to go paint Derek Jeter — unless Jeter comes to my studio and puts on the Slugger uniform.”
