It’s the darnedest thing: Landscape
painter Marina Mangubi paints on two-by-four boards. That’s
right, lumber. Her curious miniature panoramic scenes of rural Ohio and
Oregon, as well as the French Riviera are on view in the Visual
Arts Gallery at the University of Illinois at Springfield —
and they are certainly worth a look.
Mangubi, 38, grew up in Moscow in a family of
engineers who were collectors of art, even in hard times. Their
two-room apartment was filled with Russian and European paintings,
and above her bed hung three pastoral watercolors. “To a kid
painter growing up in a totalitarian society, they were glimpses of
a perfect world the way an 18th-century artist saw it — far
from the Communist ideal that I was told to contemplate,”
Mangubi says in her artist’s statement. She was influenced at
an early age by the Dutch Baroque painters, including Jacob van
Ruisdael, Meindert Hobbema, and the later works of Peter Paul
Rubens. Many of them painted on wood, and their emphasis on the
horizon line made an impression on young Marina.
Mangubi emigrated to the United States in
1981, when she was 15. Although she studied neuroscience before
turning to painting as a career, Mangubi earned a master of fine
arts degree from the University of Michigan and now teaches
painting at Wooster College in Wooster, Ohio. In graduate school
she worked on large canvases — four by four feet, typically
— and her work was much looser. Now she makes
delicate strokes and uses tiny sable brushes to depict marshes and
cliffs. The early influence of Dutch and Flemish painters is evident in
Mangubi’s sprawling landscapes and luminous oil colors. The
eight-foot-long two-by-fours seem to be an ideal medium for the
project.
When Mangubi began her Oregon series in 1999,
she sat in the back of her pickup truck, carefully sketching the
landscapes with a stylus onto copper plates. Back in the studio,
she made drypoint prints from the plates, using them as a guide for
her paintings. The plates and prints are on view as well.
Last year Mangubi received a fellowship from
the Camargo Foundation to paint in Cassis, France, and included in
this show are four panoramas from the French Riviera. What one
notices about her paintings, particularly those from Cassis, is the
beautiful quality of the light and the lovely layered blues and
siennas in her palette. Mangubi’s paintings from Oregon and
Ohio depict flat landscapes that could be Illinois, except for all
of the trees on the horizon.
Eight Board
Feet, a show by Marina Mangubi, runs
through Feb. 10 at the UIS Health Sciences Building.
This article appears in Feb 3-9, 2005.
