Somerville artist Wilhelm Neusser’s “Downhill” – oil on canvas, 48” x 66″ – currently on display at Abigail Ogilvy Gallery in Boston.

By Rachel Berets

While riding the Somerville Bike Path from his home to his studio this spring, Somerville artist Wilhelm Neusser watched the natural world come back to life in all its color and intensity, just as stay-at-home orders went into effect.

Neusser sensed a disconnect between the growth of the changing season and the stifling nature of life during the pandemic. This disconnect inspired Neusser’s latest solo exhibition, titled The Sixth Season, which is on display from now until mid-December at the Abigail Ogilvy Gallery in Boston.

His exhibition uses elements of the traditional landscape painting as a filter for a spring season lost to the pandemic. The landscape paintings that Neusser started in March are brimming with bright layers of yellow forsythia, obscuring a cloudy blue-green background.

“It all started to bloom and spring was popping, but we were kind of not allowed to go out,” said Neusser. “There’s nature, there’s spring, there’s this awakening, and then there’s at the same time this kind of uncertainty or skepticism of the outdoors.”

“Bog/White Cloud” – oil on linen, 66” x 48″ – currently on display at Abigail Ogilvy Gallery in Boston. ~ Photos by Julia Featheringill Photography

For Neusser, these pandemic-inspired works are a continuation of his interest in landscape paintings. Born and raised in western Germany, Neusser has lived and worked in the United States for almost ten years.

His previous work includes a series on cranberry bogs, an essential New England scene that fascinated the German-born painter. “On the one hand it is a very low-key traditional thing, but then I thought it’s a very strong picture of a certain mood,” said Neusser.

“There’s the expression of being ‘bogged down’ by something and it’s called a cranberry bog. For me as a non-native speaker that totally fit together, ‘bogged down’ and being in the bog – it’s this kind of not knowing where to go or hard to get out of.”

Neusser sees his Sixth Season paintings and his work on the cranberry bogs as small windows to something bigger. He mostly avoids the figure in his paintings, making the viewer contemplate and negotiate their own relationship to the landscape. “The viewer becomes the figure that’s about to step into the landscape,” said Neusser.

Many of Neusser’s paintings are hyper-local, such as his Sixth Season painting Picnic, a recognizable scene of Fresh Pond Reservation in Cambridge. But he also hopes a cranberry bog or New England scene could be accessible to a larger audience.

“The initial inspiration is the walk around Fresh Pond, but I hope this is a painting that could also appeal to someone in Munich. He doesn’t know anything about Fresh Pond, maybe it doesn’t matter, but sees the kind of looming dark clouds and thinks this is actually conveying a mood that’s somewhat foreboding.”

The “looming dark clouds” in the background of Neusser’s paintings are similar to those found in Dutch 16th century painter Pieter Bruegel’s series Six Seasons for a Dining Room.

During Bruegel’s time, there were considered by the Dutch to be six seasons – fall, winter, early spring, spring, early summer, and late summer. Bruegel painted six large-scale landscape paintings depicting each one of the six seasons, but the spring-inspired painting was lost.

The title for Neusser’s show, The Sixth Season, is a reference to Bruegel’s lost spring painting and a season lost to the pandemic.

Neusser also mentions the pressure for artists to turn a “season lost” into a period of increased creativity. “I think what happened is that it drew me in in a good and in a bad way,” said Neusser, referring to the allure of pandemic productivity.

“I think I got absorbed in a way that was sometimes too close for comfort because I didn’t have the balance of social encounters. At the same time there were paintings where I just struggled and fought with for longer and that brought out qualities that I wouldn’t have received under so-called ‘normal circumstances.’”

Neusser is done fighting with the painting for now, but doesn’t know when he will go back to creating art under “normal circumstances.”

“There will always be a new normal,” said Neusser. “It’s not up to me to decide, but describing the way there, that would be my goal.”