Walter A. Prochownik (1923-2000)

In 1989 Walter Prochownik produced a series of paintings that were exhibited at the Center under the title, Apocalyptic Landscape. His acrylic on wood paintings represented a twentieth-century experience, while acknowledging the transcendentalism of the previous century as exemplified by Emerson, Thoreau, and others. It now seemed that the divine presence in nature, at the heart of pantheism, had to be expressed in a new form of luminism. A pure, phosphorescent light radiates from the rupture of a heavily encrusted, polluted plane. It is as if the skin of the universe had been permeated by a perfection that, because of its antithesis, will be healing.

Nancy Weekly, Head of Collections and Charles Cary Rumsey Curator