Artists Walk The Path

The view of a mountain in Sichuan, China is breathtaking, though not for the usual reasons. Photographer Roy Money doesn’t train his camera on the usual kind of tourist pictures — the highest peak, the widest vista, the prettiest temple. Instead, he has an eye for the beauty in the details, the shape of the land, a mat of vegetation, curls of fog. Pictures of famous vistas might make us want to go there. Pictures like Money’s might give us more of a sense of what it’s like to already be there.

The image is one of many in ​“Mountains and Rivers” — running now with William Butcher’s ​“The Portal Series/Expanding Visions” at Kehler Liddell Gallery on Whalley Avenue in Westville through March 10 — that show Money’s eye for foreign landscapes, and the ways the dazzle of the new doesn’t make his inner compass go astray.

Money ​“borrows a phrase from traditional Chinese landscape painting, ​‘mountains and rivers,’ which refers to the totality of nature.” Money explains that the photographs are the result of several trips to China, a place with which he developed an affinity. His ​“first trip to China inspired his return to photography 15 years ago and then subsequent trips as well.” 

The sense of rejuvenation in the vivid images is strong. Soaring canyon walls pop with striation. Streams cascade and explode through jumbles of rock. Persimmons hang on bare branches like flocks of round birds. But in time Money’s eye also returns to the small things. Tree roots take on gnarled shapes in the moss. Two water-smoothed pebbles lie in the said. And then there’s a shot like the above of the Pacific Ocean, which feels both kinetic and austere at the same time. It’s austere thanks to the muted color palette, the gray beach against the gray sky muting the water itself. But Money also captures the crackling detail, the foaming wave, the water rushing through the rocks in streaks. It’s a picture you can almost hear and feel as much as you see it.

If Money finds a sense of vastness in the world around him, painter William Butcher finds it within. His work ​“explores the concept and the notion that each created image represents a portal or gateway into an imagined reality,” an accompanying statement reads. ​“Each work is developed according to deeply personal perceptions and observations. These are essentially visions and musings that emanate from the heart and the mind. In this way, they are allegories that are reflections of the soul. At the core of this is a peculiar hidden force to create and communicate visually on a level beyond semantic that ventures into the spiritual and ethereal universe … the language of painting must be painstakingly reinvented and its art continually rediscovered.”

Butcher’s description of his process gives the impression that he titles his paintings after they’re finished. In that sense, the titles are the first interpretation, by the painter taking a look at the canvases as a viewer might. What does he see in his paintings? What do we see? Butcher’s description of his aims and methods makes writing about it at all a little foolish. But the communication is happening nonetheless, in the way a conscientious viewer and the painter follow the same path, tracing each line, each shape, each brushstroke. They don’t have to be thinking the same thing in order to walk the path together.

“Mountains and Rivers” and ​“The Portal Series/Expanding Visions” runs at Kehler Liddell Gallery, 873 Whalley Ave., through March 10. Visit the gallery’s website for hours and more information.