Featured Reviews, Fragments:

from writings about the works of Alan Paine Radebaugh

Alan’s delightful paintings of Ohio capture the mood and colors of the sky and Hardwood trees of the Midwest and remind me of the Gustave Baumann woodblock prints inspired by his [Baumann’s] time spent in Brown County, Indiana more than a century ago.

JF, Baumann collector, August 2020

[Radebaugh’s] post-modernist abstract expressionist style focuses on a fragmented experience of the landscape.  [His] surfaces celebrate nature like a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem.

Wesley Pulkka
Southwestern Landscapes – New Mexico Artists, Collector’s Guide, 2005

Radebaugh’s loose style and fluid forms are among his strengths as a painter.  With a few muted colors and strokes of paint As Above [one of Alan’s paintings] hovers between prehistoric past and present moment. It captures the intangible feeling of standing in front of a place and remembering what was there through the traces of what we are viewing. 

Mary Tsiongas MFA
Exhibition catalog, Ghost of Sea 2014: Alan Paine Radebaugh

[Radebaugh’s] post-modernist abstract expressionist style focuses on a fragmented experience of the landscape.  [His] surfaces celebrate nature like a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem.

Wesley Pulkka
Southwestern Landscapes – New Mexico Artists, Collector’s Guide, 2005

Radebaugh’s complex patterns of negative and positive space capture the stark shadow and light of the Plains.  The resulting landscapes shape-shift between abstraction and representation, echoing the glints of sun off the shining sea.  Ultimately, he makes visible the ghostlike imprint of the sea across the horizon of these Plains, perhaps foreshadowing our future.  

Jeanne Shoeff
Director, Lincoln Center Gallery, Fort Collins, Colorado
Curator, Ghost of Sea: Alan Paine Radebaugh, 2013

Radebaugh recognizes nature’s beauty not in its literal forms, but in the abstract shapes comprising all that he sees.  These organic pieces and patterns are brought into focus in his … paintings.

Stefanie Laufersweiler
Sketchbook Confidential, 2010

…Radebaugh has methodically rethought landscape painting; he has ripped apart landscape theory, abrogating all he found extraneous and unnecessary, and put it back together again. Radebaugh’s procedure involves synthesis and reinvention. The forms it produces serve not as symbols. They are facts. They await the kind of objective correlative that will justify their being, an act Radebaugh entrusts to his viewers.

If Pollack and others of the abstract expressionist school freed line and form from their traditional roles in painting, Radebaugh has responded to their spontaneity and extended it with his almost self-conscious linear detailing.

Douglas Kent Hall
Mass: Of Our World, 2009

The artist would rather us not take his shapes so literally, since to do so only limits their possibilities. Like Aristotle, the perceptible qualities of an object such as its color, texture, size, and shape are mere accidents that mask the essential thing in itself. It is the sense of accumulation that counts more than the identity of one part of the whole.

Robert Ware, PhD
Curator, Jonson Gallery, University of New Mexico Art Museum
Exhibition catalog, Alan Paine Radebaugh - Mass: Of Our World, 2007

Radebaugh has arrived, from a long journey, relaxed and in control with his latest lyrical abstractions.  The luscious paint quality and free brushwork are obvious acts of joy. Diptychs like “Missive” are filled with nature-driven energy and warm colors.

Wesley Pulkka
Albuquerque Journal, June 22, 2004

The fragments have had a dendritic feeling to them – a fundamental angle-of-repose quality; not static, but in a stable equilibrium.  But these pieces seem to me to have a different movement, a to-and-fro feeling more like a falling leaf than water in its channel, and therefore more buoyant, the laws of chance and of gravity still carving new forms out of chaos before our very eyes….

J. A., collector, June 2004

These deceptively simple depictions of shapes found in nature…are comforting reminders of the power and mystery of the earth and its organisms.  Radebaugh’s work is a revelation.

Steve Robert Allen
Alibi January 9-15, 2003 -- The Best of 2002 in Arts and Literature

Fragments and inferences make up our consciousness.  Art transforms our perception into wholeness.  APR is an artist who understands these verities, and who maintains a clear and down-to-earth viewpoint about them.

Suzanne Deats
Abstract Art: the New Mexican Artist Series 2003

Most days Radebaugh takes to the field, wandering trails and roads with his sketch pad....In the night he turns the floodlights onto his canvases and with a patient accuracy, turns what he had found in the daytime into art.

Stephen Kuno
Crowsnest Pass Promoter, Blairmore, Alberta, May 28, 2002

Great Fragment I by Alan Paine Radebaugh directs us further into the void.  This is that fabled map to nowhere.  Rich and authoritative in its conception and execution, the fragment unrolls like some ancient and noble scroll that possesses neither a legend nor a reality.  It echoes the pithy substance of poetry and the uneasy veracity of a myth with neither character nor coherent storyline.

Douglas Kent Hall
Art of Albuquerque 2002, Exhibition Catalog

Radebaugh reminds us of the grandeur of a blade of grass, the shadow of a leaf, and because of it we know something about the field of grass, the tree.

Cynthia Sanchez PhD.
Curator’s Statement, October 4, 2002 -- Chasing Fragments: 1982 -- 2002

These etchings evoke a very primal and primitive response, yet they inhabit an atmosphere of haunting restraint. Their graceful form suggests fluidity, gentility and energy.

Lisa Polisar
Crosswinds Weekly October 24-31, 2002