Rebecca Allan, Voltaire’s Garden (Love Letter to Lebanon), 2015. 
Acrylic and peel collage on canvas, 52 by 60 inches. Courtesy of the artist and 447 Space.

By RAPHY SARKISSIAN | October 25, 2025

In an era dominated by mixed-media installations and immersive experiences, the continued relevance of painting remains a subject of critical discourse. Rebecca Allan’s partially figurative landscapes are a striking example of this, powerfully manifesting Isabelle Graw’s layered and somewhat paradoxical theory of “the love of painting." Graw’s concept centers on the medium’s ability to fascinate viewers—what she terms its perceived “vitality.” This exhibition’s densely constructed and chromatically complex paintings do more than depict the natural world; they function as social and cultural agents. Within these works, Allan revitalizes the medium by channeling contemporary ecological concerns through a historically informed vocabulary—a pursuit she extends through her work as a horticulturist and garden designer.

Allan’s practice, grounded in hands-on horticultural labor, invests her paintings with a tangible sense of agency and “aliveness.” By compressing not only painterly gestures but also the physical work of tending, pruning, cultivating, and nurturing into material surfaces, her paintings become vivid instances of Graw’s claim that a painting’s value lies in its condensation of the artist’s life and oeuvre. The incremental work of tending plants parallels the slow, accumulative structure of her compositions, wherein nature’s terribilità is revealed. Her connection to the transcendental American landscape tradition (Thomas Cole, Frederic Edwin Church, Charles Burchfield) provides a historical scaffolding that affirms painting’s enduring vitality while situating contemporary ecological preoccupations within a long lineage of American artmaking.

This intertwinement of horticultural and painterly praxes is exemplified in Voltaire’s Garden (Love Letter to Lebanon). Here abstraction gains charge through chromatic pleasure and gestural exuberance. Rooted in her experience as a visiting artist in Beirut, the painting stands as a vivid enactment of Graw’s theory. The title reactivates Voltaire’s call to “cultivate one’s own garden,” reframed within the context of Allan’s painterly and personal engagement with Lebanon. Acrylic and peel collage accumulate as strata—materializing a poetics of earth, memory, and painterly labor. The canvas becomes a physical record of perceptual work, linking horticultural tending to painterly making and offering an ecological meditation through abstraction. Through layers of acrylic and chromatic facture, the work affirms painting’s continued vitality as articulated in Graw’s model.

Rebecca Allan, Keats House (Hampstead), 2024.
Acrylic on canvas, 18 by 24 inches. Courtesy of the artist and 447 Space, New York.

Strikingly, this vitality extends into an evocative musical space. The polyphony of Laura Kaminsky’s Wave Hill: III. Arbores Venerabiles reveals itself as an unmistakable reverberation of the painterly facture and hapticity of Allan’s Keats House (Hampstead). This implicit synesthesia activates the beholder’s multisensory memory, prompting renewed perceptual engagement. Through the painting’s textural and gestural surface, Allan evokes the rigor and dynamism of musical composition, aligning the work with Graw’s notion of painting’s special vitality. Such vivacity amplifies the viewer’s perceptual responses, transforming the visual encounter into a multisensory event—a layered experience of music-making and painting.

Rebecca Allan, Constellation in a Grass Garden, 2023.
Acrylic on canvas, 50 inches diameter. Courtesy of the artist and 447 Space, New York.  

Within Allan’s sustained engagement with specific landscapes and ecological questions, a pair of related works reveals her evolving dialogue with different environments over time. Constellation in a Grass Garden offers a microcosm of the exhibition’s central themes—an evocative entry point into her philosophical, formal, and ontological concerns. As a circular painting, or tondo, it recalls the oculus of the Pantheon, expanding the pictorial field into a space without horizon. Within this cosmic field, a floating constellation of air-and-water vesicles and orbs evokes the interdependence between the terrestrial and the celestial—a meditation on existence that simultaneously reflects the painter's attentive horticultural practice. 

Rebecca Allan, Nurse Log (Mount Baker), 2013.
Acrylic on canvas, 42 inches diameter. Courtesy of the artist and 447 Space, New York.

Mirroring the celestial field of Constellation in a Grass Garden, the tondo titled Nurse Log (Mount Baker) also denies the viewer a horizon, offering instead a vertiginous view from above. Drawing from a decade spent in the Pacific Northwest, Allan translates the natural phenomenon of a “nurse log”—a decaying tree stump giving rise to new life—into a compelling visual metaphor for regeneration and the cyclical nature of the forest. The tondo’s circular frame encloses a dense and layered field, where the decomposition of one form gives rise to another. Thus the work operates as an ecological stratification, transforming the horticultural cycle of decay and growth into a formal meditation on natural and art-making processes.

 Rebecca Allan, Door to the Mesa, 2024.
Acrylic on canvas, 48 by 60 inches. Courtesy of the artist and 447 Space, New York.

A work that recontextualizes the American sublime, Door to the Mesa is a semi-abstract landscape in a subdued and sandy palette of pale peach and dusty orange. Through its very materiality and expressive handling, the painting recasts the tradition of Frederic Edwin Church. While Church’s grand canvases primarily concealed their labor behind intricately worked detail to produce an illusion of nature, Allan’s painting reverses that grammar. Through the formal articulation of mark and color, she foregrounds the painting’s substance, achieving a vitality that recalls the luminosity in Church’s own radiant skies. Here, the sublime is no longer tethered to the panoramic or the monumental but located in the raw, tectonic materiality of the paint itself—a phenomenological articulation of nature’s sublime that departs from its historical grandeur. 

Rebecca Allan, Diver (Booth’s Quarry, Vinalhaven), 2017.
Acrylic on canvas, 48 by 60 inches. Courtesy of the artist and 447 Space, New York.

Diver (Booth’s Quarry, Vinalhaven) establishes a heightened dissonance between the natural and the cultural. Its layered and tectonic composition shares a formal and material language with Clayton S. Price’s Coastline (c. 1924). Like Price’s modernist work, Allan’s painting functions, in Graw’s sense, as an index of labor and condensed time. Both artists reveal traces of their actions—the bristle of the brush, the density of the paint, the movement of the hand—inviting the viewer’s awareness of process and its unfolding revelations. Through gestural brushwork and chromatic singularity, Allan’s luminous field invokes Price’s radiant compositions while opening onto broader ecological discourse. In its visible commitment to the medium and its interplay with history, the painting embodies what Graw describes as an ongoing conversation between its art-historical precedents and its contemporary moment.
 

Rebecca Allan, Construction Site with Manual Switch (Bronx to Buffalo), 2018.
Acrylic on canvas, 60 by 48 inches. Courtesy of the artist and 447 Space, New York.

Extending this dialogue between nature and culture, Construction Site with Manual Switch (Bronx to Buffalo) probes the tension between the natural and the industrial. Drawing on the industrial landscapes of her native Buffalo, the painting’s forms and language evoke modernism’s fascination with engineered structures—a legacy reinforced by Le Corbusier’s description of the city’s concrete grain elevators as the “first fruits of the new age.” Yet where Le Corbusier celebrated the purity of cylindrical form and mechanized order, Allan redirects that impulse through painterly intuition, translating structural clarity into chromatic articulation. The cranes and girders emerge as central, almost sculptural forms, mediating between order and flux, material control and perceptual openness. The result is a meditation on how human systems of production intersect with—and negotiate in tension with—natural processes. In this sense, the work articulates what Graw describes as painting’s capacity to render visible the negotiations among material process, human labor, and the social conditions of seeing. 

Rebecca Allan, From Geirangerfjord (Norway) to Pine Mountain (Kentucky), 2014-17.
Acrylic on canvas, 60 by 64 inches. Courtesy of the artist and 447 Space, New York.

In the gesturally elaborate and abstract painting titled From Geirangerfjord (Norway) to Pine Mountain (Kentucky), Allan traces a passage through pulsating shades of green—a chromatic terrain that folds distant geographies into a shared pictorial field. The title marks both a physical and conceptual journey, connecting her twin practices of painting and gardening. Yet rather than fusing the Norwegian fjord and the Appalachian highlands, Allan allows their painterly and temporal differences to coexist in tension: glacial depth against humid overgrowth, mineral opacity against vegetal translucence. This oscillation between cultivation and wilderness, surface and depth, articulates an ecological sensibility grounded not in unity but in process—one attuned to the perpetual negotiation between intervention and the persistence of the natural world.

Rebecca Allan, Verdant Forest Pool, 2019.
Acrylic on canvas, 43 by 52 inches. Courtesy of the artist and 447 Space, New York. 

In Verdant Forest Pool, Allan stages a dialogue between two opposing pictorial sensibilities. The work gestures toward the luminous stillness of Monet’s Water Lilies yet resists that pure tranquility. Through its vigorous, interwoven brushstrokes and torrential layering, the painting channels a turbulence closer to Cecily Brown’s fragmentation than to Monet’s serenity. What emerges is less a citation than a transformation: the contemplative and the chaotic held in productive suspension. Here, nature is no longer a mirror for reflection but a field of active encounter, where gesture becomes a mode of thinking through light, matter, and motion.

Rebecca Allan, Shade Cloth (Issima), 2025.
Acrylic on canvas, 50 by 60 inches. Courtesy of the artist and 447 Space, New York. 

Shade Cloth (Issima) translates the atmosphere of a rare plant nursery into a lyrical composition that hovers between figuration and abstraction. Rooted in the artist’s intertwined practices as horticulturalist and land conservation advocate, the work meditates on the primordial intersection of nature and controlled cultivation. A pulsating tripod sprinkler on the right asserts a grounding mechanical presence, seemingly radiating diffused light and irrigating the painterly space across the surface. Above, the polypropylene ceiling—referenced in the title—introduces a layer of material abstraction: this protective fabric filters and refracts light, suspending the illusion of an exterior view while asserting its own materiality in a dislocated stroke of sky blue. The palette of greys, yellows, turquoises, greens, and violets represents a fertile environment, treating color both as observation and as painterly translation. This chromatic logic enables the artist to reconfigure the conventions of landscape representation, turning the act of nurturing into the painting's form and subject matter. Shade Cloth (Issima) becomes a study in the tension between organic growth and the human structures that sustain and contain it—transforming a Rhode Island nursery into a meditation on the broader life of the botanical world.

Rebecca Allan, Thunderstorm in the Quarry (Vinalhaven), 2025.
Acrylic on canvas, 84 by 80 inches. Courtesy of the artist and 447 Space, New York.

In Thunderstorm in the Quarry (Vinalhaven), Allan employs a palette of pinks, peaches, lavenders, greens, and yellows, unraveling nature’s restless vitality. The human-scaled work invites a phenomenological encounter—a direct engagement with both the act of painting and the confrontation with nature itself. This approach to landscape, with its sweeping gestures and dissolving fields of color, traces Helen Frankenthaler’s celebrated reinterpretation of Paul Cézanne’s vision, manifesting an active dialogue with an art-historical antecedent that remains felt rather than proclaimed. Yet unlike Frankenthaler’s soak-stain technique, which draws pigment into the canvas, Allan’s layered and decisively additive process builds expressive agency at the surface. This dialogue is heightened by the presence of billowing curtains, which draw the viewer—momentarily a beholder absorbed in perception—toward both the exterior world and the canvas’s material surface, collapsing the distance between perception and medium. The work’s vigorous brushwork and tactile surface embody Graw’s concept of how painterly gestures render the artist’s living labor visible, thereby contributing to the work’s cultural and perceptual vitality.

Rebecca Allan, Burn Pile, 2022.
Acrylic on canvas, 60 by 48 inches. Courtesy of the artist and 447 Space, New York.

Within the cultural platform of 447 Space, Groundcovered (A Survey) transforms the gallery into a prismatic arbor, a space suffused with radiant color, tracing a thirty-year trajectory. The visual logic of the installation is perceptually embodied in one of Allan's most chromatically sonorous paintings: Voltaire’s Garden (Love Letter to Lebanon), a work that reveals itself through its own musicality. Its intoxicating hues emanate a tonal shimmer that calls to mind Maurice Ravel’s orchestral touchstone Le Tombeau de Couperin, a composition that reimagines Baroque forms. The painting’s chromatic exuberance of pinks, corals, and vermilion imparts a kineticism akin to Ravel’s final movement, the Rigaudon—often described by musicologists as triumphantly propulsive. This vibrant and layered surface, built through vigorous brushwork, establishes a structural dialogue with the music’s shifting tempos and chromatic ornamentation, translating classical form into painterly terms. The resplendent reds and pinks of the painting correspond materially with the sonic language of the Rigaudon. Both works, with their own degrees of fantasy, liveliness, and liberation, release their inherited idioms—untethered now—into new registers and new modes of articulation. 

Ultimately, the painting stands as a quiet affirmation: a material condensation of a garden where horticulture gives way to chromatic vibrancy and the persistence of labor becomes visible. And yet beyond a Ravelian aural craft, another corporeal pulse takes hold within Allan’s painted gardens, one that recalls the controlled turbulence of Muse’s “Butterflies and Hurricanes.” Within these gardens, her rhythmically charged tonalities become visual counterparts to Matt Bellamy’s cascading piano arpeggios, embodying the pulse of what Graw terms painting’s living labor: the visibility of process as an index of agency. In this sense, Allan’s chromatic polyphony does not merely represent desire or memory—it performs them, rendering the act of painting itself as a social and material reality.

In Rebecca Allan’s hands, landscape becomes a resonant score—its surface articulating a rhythm of painterly work that continues to unfold beyond the frame. WM

Rebecca Allan: Groundcovered (A Survey)
447 Space
September 12 – October 24, 2025