Whether traveling in a horse drawn carriage on the Albany Post Road through the Hudson River Valley or on a jet plane across the globe a landscape is out the window. All Day Long seeks to explore the distinct approach to this vista taken by an artist. Are they glancing at the whole as it swirls by endlessly or are they putting on their hiking boots and bushwacking into the beating heart of it? How much of Virginia Woolf’s “I-shaped shadow” is stretching across the canvas or does the artist stand back and observe dispassionately?

Kikuo Saito was not alone as an abstract painter with a landscape habit. All Day Long will investigate the relationship between abstraction and landscape, paying homage to Kikuo's vision for an interdisciplinary art of making and moving, free of borders and definitions.

Dorothy Knowles is quoted as advising aspiring landscape painters to “set up facing the most traditionally picturesque vista you could find, then turn around and paint whatever was behind you.” Dorothy was a painter who never missed a moment of beauty - whether it was in front of or behind her she was out of the car with her hiking boots on, deep inside the heart of Canada’s prairies.

Clement Greenberg, the art critic and a landscape painter himself, believed that Knowles “was the only landscape painter [he]came across…whose work tended towards the monumental in the authentic way.”  And his own paintings show his aspirations toward her truth, if not quite her monumentality.

Naofumi Maruyama’s paintings float in a less precise, more liquid vista, but are no less authentic. Painting onto wet cotton on the floor (a perspective and method the Abstract Expressionists held dear) his process creates a boundaryless panorama, leaving the viewer in a wetland, reminding us that we live constantly on unstable, physically shifting ground.

Both Elizabeth Hazan and John McAllister use heightened color to make landscapes where the inherent melancholy of time passing and the inevitability of our mortality are removed. Only wonder remains.  In a recent interview Hazan quotes Picasso’s famous line: “There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.” She goes on to say that “the sentiment suggests that ideas don’t grow on trees but might be inspired by them.”  

Michael Angelo Manzino’s youthful mastery of abstract painting can be appreciated on a purely non-representational level, but what fascinates further is the sense that we’re looking at a fabricated topographical map. Here we are the jet fliers not the buggy riders, taking in a landscape Monet could not dream of—just as Hazan and McAllister’s colors are a hot embrace that might embarrass the painter who wanted us subsumed in his lily pond.

Landscape is poetic and vast and takes care of itself, but humans wish to both permeate the scenery and be embraced by it. This push-pull creates a constantly changing landscape – surfaces traveled, rubbed and effaced over and over again – yet revealing its history for humans to interpret. This palimpsest, having fascinated artists through the ages, went on to survive the 20th century’s turn toward abstraction and now presents us with a new urgency in the 21st.