Henri Linton was born in Arkansas in 1944. Henri Linton has been chairman of the Department of Art at the University of Arkansas Pine Bluff for the last twenty years. During this time he has created hundreds of paintings inspired by the Arkansas landscape. Linton is a transformational painter, using the raw material of nature to create entirely human statements about art. This exhibition provides a sample of his most recent works, 1998 - 2000.

Spending his early childhood in rural Alabama, Henri Linton didn't even know there was a profession that would make use of the pictures he continually drew, for by second grade he was drawing and painting out of his own inclination. When he moved to Tuscaloosa at age nine, he found his teachers supportive. Though he had other interests common to any nine year old boy - basketball - when the urge to paint came over him, everything else was dropped.
Linton realized as he matured that his future lay in painting and he began to enter national art contests, winning a four-year scholarship to the Columbus College of Art and Design in Ohio. Despite never having left Alabama before, Linton moved. Working odd jobs to pay for art supplies, from shining shoes to painting signs, Linton frequented nearby museums for inspiration. It was not uncommon for him and his classmates to hitchhike hundreds of miles to see exhibits in Cleveland and New York.
After receiving his diploma from CCAD, Linton went on to earn a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Boston University, then a master's degree in art from the University of Cincinnati Graduate School of Fine Arts. While at Boston University, Linton was approached by John Howard, then chairman of the new art department at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, the state's historically black university. Howard wanted Linton to come work for UAPB. After a sabbatical to work toward his masters degree, Linton took the offer and eventually succeeded Howard as department chair.
Linton's artistic output has evolved from his early expansive canvasses of equal parts dark and light, with figures, to his unique view of landscapes, stretching out from an aerial view and reflecting more a state of mind than a sense of place. Linton's work is infused with an intimacy that points up the interiority of his subjects. Arkanscape #9 is a vivid swirl of colors and the entire piece has a strong vertical element, unusual in Linton's mainly horizontal works. The polychrome trees may call to mind autumn, but the swath of blue and purple above turns this landscape into an abstract dreamscape. The line of trees receding in the distance calls to mind a train snaking through the Delta, headed to some unknown destination.
In the studio, Linton works spontaneously, with little sketching before setting up his paper and acrylic paints. He works deliberately and quickly, with no reworking. His Impression series is characterized by a loose, energetic brushstroke, creating an expressionistic feel in the finished works. Many of his pieces, including Impression #961, make it plain Linton is not recreating a specific landscape. Using his feel for the land and his instinct for paint, Linton creates masses of earth tones set off by deep greens and blues, achieving a marriage of reality and imagination. With minute shifts of perception, the viewer can enjoy a beautiful, familiar landscape, or an aesthetic combination of colors on canvas.

Erin Branham
Curator of Education

Henri Linton: Recent Landscapes
Artist's Notes

The paintings of this exhibit represent my attempt to capture in paint the qualities of the natural world that excite me. I work with the plastic properties of paints as a dimensional medium.
For the past twenty-two years, the landscape of the Arkansas Delta as seen from the air has been the central motif and the primary inspiration for my paintings. After years of hovering over the Delta I have finally returned to earth to take a closer, more intimate look at the landscape as evidenced by Bayou Bartholomew Via North.
My work continues to be about our transformation from one place to another and how the landscape is in a constant state of flux when altered by our point of reference in time and space. The paintings become a record of our journey in space.
Prior to 1978, the human form was the central motif for much of my work. Except for a series of commissioned portraits the human form was absent from the hundreds of paintings produced since that time. In this series of paintings the human presence or any evidence of man's existence can be seen in Bayou Bartholomew Via North.
Why the landscape? It is everywhere I go. There is so much of it. It gives me a frame of reference. It tells me where I am. It tells me that I am alive when I awake in the morning. The beauty and power of nature make me feel good to be alive. The light, space, land mass, sky, water - all elements of nature have a spiritually uplifting effect on my everyday existence. I want my painting to evoke the same feeling.
I try no to dictate to the viewer what he or she should feel as a result of looking at my paintings. If I paint a sunset or the sky at sunrise, it hopefully is a statement about the sky as a color area and how it relates to the rest of the painting. I am not a mood painter. I prefer that one see my paintings as abstractions. I want my paintings to be about color as light, about patterns, mass and mark making and how these elements may become the abstract equivalent of a beautiful landscape.

Henri Linton
2000