Minutiae en Masse Greg Navratil’s brilliant nature scenes combine heightened realism with a strong underlying abstract sensibility. by Austin R. Williams ! When you stand in front of a painting by Oregon artist Greg Navratil, there’s a lot to take in. First, there’s the size, which is generally large, with some paintings comprising numerous square panels adding up to several feet on each side. Then, there’s the color. Many of Navratil’s paintings are blasts of unadulterated hues taken straight from the tube, and their brilliance is extra surprising because the subject matter is frequently sticks, dirt, leaves and bits of trash—things usually painted with subdued earth tones and grays. Perhaps most striking of all is the design of the images: crowded close-ups of surfaces and spaces densely packed with stuff. If the painting shows leaves, it shows hundreds of leaves, all rendered with equal finish and commanding equal attention. The paintings leave your eye momentarily at sea, stranded without the usual guiding elements of clear focal points and visual cues. Making sense of all these visual sensations can be a touch overwhelming at first, but it’s also exciting. Take Jamboree, for example. The painting shows a patch of leafy, grassy, somewhat unkempt ground. The distance between us and the subject appears small, producing a flat appearance and an extremely strong textile sense. It takes a moment for our eyes to process all the visual stimuli on offer—the grasses are very green indeed, and the dead leaves are painted with bright cadmium reds and oranges. Every inch of the painting contains something, every inch rendered to equal finish. No spot on the canvas receives preferential treatment. This allover-ness has the effect of making the painting seem to extend far beyond its edges, and this effect is amplified by the painting’s format, a tiled assemblage of six individual panels. Navratil’s view of nature is both minute and infinite. The artist achieves similar effects in other paintings. In Argentine Autumn, Navratil depicts another leafy patch of ground, but this time he strips color from the painting, making the underlying chaos of nature even more apparent. McKenzie Pool shows a waterfall, but Navratil focuses not on the dramatic, crashing falls themselves but on the thousands of small ripples downstream that are the result of this tumult. Apple Juice takes us out of the forest and into a dumpster, but it likewise offers an almost confrontationally close-up view of densely packed, visually interesting objects. Realist painting always has an element of abstraction to it—the arranging of shapes and values is, at heart, an abstract enterprise. Navratil brings this fact front-and center. One of the main objectives of his painting, indeed, seems to be to force a realization on the viewer that the appearance of nature and the patterns found in it share much of their form and beauty with the chaotic patterns found in the work of Abstract Expressionists. “I’ve always been a fan of Jackson Pollock, and I’ve always liked his allover paintings, where you look over the entire canvas and there are numerous focal points,” Navratil says. Inspired in part by this approach, Navratil began to paint outdoor scenes of ground. “I would look down and think it was just beautiful, with all the shapes and colors,” he says. “And I just started painting this way. “You get really close to my paintings and they look chaotic, with haphazard brushstrokes,” he continues. “But from 100 feet away, it looks like a photograph. In these allover paintings, abstraction is not removed from nature. The surfaces are covered from edge to edge and from corner to corner. Your eyes are invited to wander everywhere, to follow the lines, shapes and values. Each area of the composition is given equal attention and significance. Colors are applied with paint dispensers in thick layers which appear to be haphazard up close. There is a balance between the painting traditions of abstraction and realism.” !2 Navratil finds some of his subjects during his travels across North America; others are found closer to home. “Lately I’ve been using things right out of my yard,” he says, “but I do travel a lot. I do a lot of hiking, and I start photographing a lot of stuff that interests me. I love being out in nature and seeing what’s out there. Nature inspires my photographs, and then my photos inspire my paintings.” Navratil is most inspired by the fullness of the forest, with its mazes of trees and dense canopies of leaves. “I actually live near a beach, but I don’t do many beach scenes,” he says. “It’s too calm for me—too many open areas. I like chaos and detail.” When he is out walking, Navratil photographs his surroundings with a Canon Rebel digital camera. “I take up to a hundred photos a day, and I now have tens of thousands of photos,” he says. “It doesn’t have to be a perfect photograph—lately I’ve even been using my iPhone in some instances. Just to get the basic details and make a print is all I need.” Navratil’s photographs generally dictate the content of an image fairly strictly, from the major shapes to the fine details. “Sometimes I’ll remove things—maybe a branch that’s in the way,” he says, “but mainly what I see in the photograph is what I paint.” To replicate the content of his photos in close detail, Navratil uses a grid system similar to that of Chuck Close, another artist who achieves intensely realistic images on a large scale. In Photoshop, Navratil superimposes a square grid over his source photograph, and then he prints the photo at the size he has chosen for the painting. He draws a grid of 1-inch squares on his canvas that matches the grid on the photo and begins painting inch by inch, looking back and forth between one-inch squares on his photo and his canvas. “I’m just putting shapes and colors in—swatches of paint,” he says. “I’m not aware that I’m painting a tree or a river.” Once all the shapes have been added to the canvas, Navratil throws away his photo and begins adding more color, beginning with black shapes and working from dark to light. “It’s very thick in the end,” he says. “I’ve done up to 15 layers.” His palette includes numerous colors; he cites cadmium reds, oranges and yellows as his particular workhorses. “I use all the dangerous paints,” he says. He also uses strong amounts of black. “Black makes a world of difference,” he says. “It guides me just like the grid does.” He favors ivory black, which is slightly transparent, and often mixes it with other colors to produce deep, rich darks. In contrast to his highly realistic drawing, the artist departs from nature in color and scale. Not one to strain after exact local color, Navratil relishes the highly chromatic colors offered by acrylic. “For me, the brighter the better,” he says. “I exaggerate and push the colors a lot. Lately I’ve been using dispensers to apply pure hues—a pointillistic style on the canvas. That brightens it up, too. Your eye mixes the color from a distance.” The artist uses various brands of paint. “I use a lot of Utretcht, and I’ve started using M. Graham colors, which are made here in Oregon. But if I find a color in a different brand I try it and I just see what I like best.” Mediums play an important role in the artist’s process. “I use a lot of acrylic medium,” he says. “I use gallons of gloss medium. I mix it with the paint to give it a more translucent color, and I also put gloss medium between layers to give the painting more luminosity. When a painting’s finished I put a varnish over it, sometimes matte varnish and sometimes satin varnish.” Acrylic has always been Navratil’s preferred medium. “It’s what I started using back in college; my instructor was an acrylic painter,” he says. “I liked it a lot. I like the drying time. I tried oils, but I would play with them too much and muddy things up. With acrylic I put the stroke down, forget about it, it dries, and then I can paint over it and it won’t smear.” Several years ago, problems with his shoulder forced the artist to begin painting flat and to work on smaller canvases. “When your body starts giving you problems, you’ve got to change your style in one way or another,” he says. He turned this limitation into a strength by composing larger works out of multiple small panels, adding a degree of right-angled order to contrast with the chaotic content of the painting. As a result, the paintings seem both large and small, both unified and assembled
