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"Courbet looked very hard and had a method," Welliver remarks to the writer Edwin Denby in the catalogue. "Bierstadt did not look very hard and had a method, and de Kooning makes it up as he goes along ... I look very hard, then make it up as I go along." The idea of "sub lime" American landscape is fairly worn currency by now; there are too many generalized cliches of in stant grandeur attached to it. What saves Welliver's sense of awe at large scale is his sense of fact.
"Making it up" on a canvas eight feet square cannot be done outdoors. Laden with a 70-lb. pack of easel, paints, canvas and gear, Welliver trudges out in winter to find a scene and make an oil sketch. The large version is always a studio painting, and its fictions of spontaneity — of rapid-fire correspondence between the eye scanning a scene and the hand making its marks —take a month or more to achieve. But the paint looks direct and uncluttered; it seems to have been done alla prima, wet into wet, in a few hours. In fact, it is very considered painting. Welliver's accuracy of tone is phenomenal; there are hardly any "holes" and tonally inert areas in his work. With a loaded, flouncing brush he can put in the blue rim of ice around the cold black water of a pond, or the melting rime on the flank of a snow hummock, so that the substance is as palpable as the gesture.
In the best of his land scape work Welliver has an emotional intensity that goes beyond the ordinary limits of realism in painting. Shadow is a stand of birches in snow: strong blue sky peeping through their pale trunks, and more blue scattered in the luminous dark clefts of the snow lying on fallen brush. Just above the middle of the painting, the shadow line of a ridge falls across the trees and the ground. The hill behind you becomes a silent, extraordinary presence: not menacing, not metaphorical, but a sign of what the Middle Ages called natura naturans: nature disclosing itself, going about its business of being.
—By Robert Hughes