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Minneapolis Star Tribune review: Mary Abbe---Star Tribune Staff Writer

Modern landscape art tends to have a Matissean flavor: all bright colors, exuberant foliage and bold shapes. So there’s a fresh feel to the blurry, traditional autumnal browns of Jim Conaway’s new landscape paintings at the Groveland Gallery, 25 Groveland Terrace, Minneapolis.
The exhibition, which closes Wednesday, was inspired by the summer sojurn in Greece and Poland, where Conaway studied ancient Byzantine icons. In an introduction to the show, the former Hamline University painting teacher wrote that he was fascinated by the icons’ ravaged state, the “patina of scratches and marks of disregard by past generations.”
Returning to his Twin Cities studio, Conaway began creating his own worn “icons” to nature: landscape paintings on well-weathered pieces of wood. This is not rustic barn-siding art, but sophisticated landscape painting executed on seasoned scraps of wood salvaged from discarded cabinets, doors and furniture.
Such origins explain the long, narrow shapes of some of the work and the shadowy names peeping through the painting called “Deciduous Guardian.”
Responding to the surface he paints on, Conaway sensitively exploits the wood’s grain, letting its nicks and gouges shadow the main image like pentimenti of past lives. In paintings evocatively titled “light at the Edge” and “Ten Minutes of Sunrise,” he employs such a light veil of oil paint that it is the wood grain itself that defines a hillside, a stream or a rocky promontory where worn-white clouds settle over bosky bowers of dark trees.
Echoes of wilderness past There’s a melancholy beauty about this series that brings to mind the great, early- 19th century landscapes of the English painter John Constable (1776-1837) and the dreamy Barbizon School visions of the American artist George Innes (1825-1894) The spiky, barren trees and guttered corridor in Conaway’s “Road Triptych lll) even echo the bleak contemporary landscapes of German painter Anselm Kiefer.
 With its ceaseless rhythms of renewal and decay, nature offers a convenient and endlessly appropriate metaphor of life’s transitoriness. Conaway’s “Icons” inevitable invite that interpretation. But they take a different tack from the aspirations of his landscape predecessors.
Where Constable limned the beauties of specific English vistas, Conaway’s landscapes are imaginary. Inness imagined a misty Arcadia while Conaway muses on art as much as nature. And where Keifer’s operatic landscapes mourns the death of the German soul, Conaway’s tone poems sing an inviting song of bungalows and pleasant morning walks.