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By Daphne Hutchinson
Rappahannock Nm Contributing Writer
“People have to be able to see what you’re trying to get across. You’ve got to'make a little poem on the wall. You’ve got to make people dream, to go beyond themselves,” says Ray.
The Rappahannock County artist does just that. His paintings, drawings and etchings on display at Washington’s Middle Street Gallery are nature poems, songs of praise for the beauty of an Adirondack sunset, a Blue Ridge skyline, the surge of the Rush River. His watercolors, in velvet greens and browns with light and shadow playing over bower and branch, stir dreams of lazy afternoons spent lolling in the sunshine. They whisk the viewer out of the gallery and back to a secret garden of childhood.
The 60 some pieces at Middle Street, coupled with work simultaneously exhibited at the Veerhoff Gallerv in Washington. D.C.. comprise Mr. Heus’s efforts of the past three years. They have been years of change and growth for the artist.
For his last Middle Street show in 1982, Mr. Heus hung misty, pastel watercolors and stark etchings in shades of gray and black. His portrait drawings in conti crayons, a favorite medium of Italian and Dutch artists of the 1700’s, captured lifelike faces but without life-like color. His work was representational, colorful only in the way that a classic black and white film conveys color.
In his latest paintings, Mr. Heus remains a bold and uncompromising realist but he goes from black and white to vivid technicolor. He has changed mediums, abandoning traditional watercolors for guache, a heavy, opaque watercolor. “Watercolor relies on white paper to give the colors their brilliance. Here, the brilliance is in the paint,” he explained. “It’s been a revelation.”
In another change, he’s taken his palette outdoors. “I paint outside — solely. I used to draw outside. I would paint from my drawings and color notes, or, worse yet, from photographs. This is so much better. To my way of thinking, so much more alive,” Mr. Heus said. “But you have to be fast to paint outside. The light moves so quickly. I like to finish my paintings in one sitting. If I have to come back, even the next day, I find everything’s changed, or I’ve changed and I don’t view the scene in the same way. It’s hard to pick up where Ileft off.”
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