Rackstraw Downes at Betty Cuningham

For anyone who believes painting's connection to an artist's observation of nature, Rackstraw Downes is a hero.

Downes can spend months on a canvas, going out to a site every day for a half hour or so -- so the light remains the same each day -- observing a scene and making sketches from nature. And when I say nature, I don't mean the glorious American escape of the Hudson River painters, or even Downes' classmate Neil Welliver. I mean the complicated and well-trodden landscape of populated America. Much of Downes work, in fact, is of busy urban street corners.

The first thing you notice about Downes is how realistic is paintings look. And then the second thing you notice is how unrealistic they are.

The straight lines can curve, the colors can get flat. I wondered at first whether he was using some kind of wide-angle lens. But upon third and fourth looks, his canvases become complicated and personal. His dedication to repeated, specific observation has not taken out his choices.

Downes is only cold in reproduction. In person, his canvases are alive. From the rough texture of his canvas to the controlled elegance of his brush strokes and blobs of color, Rackstraw's vision is his own. His colors are push vibrance and saturation to the point of being unrealistic.

I had several experiences of leaning in to look and having realistic details disappear into abstractions (see detail above). He can radically simplify a field of color, how to describe a mountain, for instance, that retains fidelity to the overall vision and becomes very formal and broad on the micro level.

Below is a series of six paintings he did of a barn in Texas. It's the same barn, painted from six different angles. There's an accompanying chart for when and where these canvases came from. Like most other things, in Rackstraw Downes' art it's specificity that matters.

At Betty Cuningham Gallery until March 1.