Meridian Gallery and the San Jose Museum of Art will both show paintings by Jack Stuppin. Timed to open in close succession in San Jose and San Francisco, the exhibitions will reveal Stuppin's exuberant celebration of the landscapes and landforms of Northern California where the artist lives as well as a handful of other locales he cherishes.

Peter Selz has curated the Meridian show where he will install a panoply of Stuppin's images on all three of the gallery's floors. A newly published catalogue/book with an introduction by Peter Selz, and essays by Donald Kuspit and Susan Landauer will be available at both venues. Focusing upon the character of Jack Stuppin's new landscape paintings, Selz speaks of their "intense color and palpable brushstrokes, as paintings combining observation, spontaneity and control that make the viewer aware of the sheer beauty of the Northern California landscape. They also perform a political function by defying further urban and industrial sprawl, as they makes us realize that these hills and valleys, these trees and grasses must be preserved."

Of the approach to nature in Stuppin's large oils, Donald Kuspit makes a compelling case for their transcendence of site specificity, "however site specific - specific to some place in nature, especially the nature of California, where Stuppin lives-Stuppin's landscapes are implicitly virgin land, that is, the original 'promised land' of America. In search of fresh places to paint, Stuppin has ventured to the Catskill mountains, 2008 and Olana Pond, 2007 in New York and Flaming Gorge, Utah, 2005, but it is always the same untouched, paradisiac, "original" place. They are all places on which man has not yet laid his heavy hand, or laid a not too heavy hand-there are no property lines in Stuppin's landscapes, no hint that the land is owned by anyone, nor is the landscape moralized to give it a "higher meaning," to make it more "epic" with meaning than it inherently is… What we see in Jack Stuppin's landscape is the old American nature in all its intransigent virginity."

And Susan Landauer who curated the smaller, focused showing of work for San Jose stresses the excessive, essentially erotic character of Stuppin's fecund imagery as it departs radically from his former plein air investigations into studio work that moves into use of improbable color and an increasing abstraction of imagery and form.