review: WAYS OF PITTSBURGH

by Emma Riva

I’ve heard it said that landscape painting is emotionless. It’s hard for it to evoke the same feeling as figuration we can see ourselves in, or as abstraction that forces us to work to find traces of our own mind in its shapes, forms, and ephemera. Plein air painter Ron Donoughe’s paintings, however, are not only flowers, sunsets, and fields, but steel mills, smokestacks, and alleyways. Donoughe is one of the first painters to do plein air in Pittsburgh, and his attention to detail and eye for the uniqueness of public space make his paintings feel like much more than traditional landscape painting. Donoughe, originally from a small town in Cambria County, has been a landscaper, gravedigger, chicken catcher, art teacher, museum installer, graphic designer, and college instructor, but his paintings have now been shown in Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art, The Westmoreland Museum of American Art and The University Museum at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

I first encountered Donoughe’s work during his open studio last year, and fell in love with his 90 Neighborhoods project, where he painted every neighborhood in the city limits. (A fun game with that book is to flip through it, find your own neighborhood, and see what Donoughe chose to highlight in it. South Side Flats, where I live, features the anecdote “I met a skateboarder and a U.S. Senator on the same day that I did this piece,” which sounds about right).

Ways of Pittsburgh, Donoughe’s next artbook, follows a similar trajectory of documentation. Donoughe asked friends, colleagues, and social media followers to send him their favorite alleyways in the city. From that, he crafted a series of plein air paintings across the city’s narrow backstreets.

The foreword to Ways of Pittsburgh by City of Pittsburgh archivist Charles Succop notes that Pittsburgh did away with the “Alley” label for its sidestreets for some unspecified reason in the 1920s. Church Alley became Coffey Way for the “Coffee that won the West,” Arbuckle Coffee, which held its offices near that tiny strip of street downtown, and the city went about renaming every other alleyway. There are some truly weird Ways in this city. Retail Way. Woolslayer Way. Goodwood Way. “All the elements needed for a successful painting can be found in our skinny streets: composition, shapes, color, a sense of depth. A neighborhood seen through the eyes of a painter, constantly considering the possibilities for future work, is probably different from how others experience the place,” Donoughe wrote in one caption.

In his depiction of Clement Way in Bloomfield, Donoughe painted the graffiti on the permission wall of Trace Brewing in memory of the late Danny Devine—as someone tapped into the graffiti scene, there was something sweet about seeing plein air and graffiti overlap in a way they might not, usually.

The nocturnes in the collection capture a particular skill of Donoughe’s, capturing the amber blush of streetlights and lit windows against the indigo of a Pittsburgh night sky.

Donoughe’s paintings remind me why I love Pittsburgh. They fill me with affection for the city, even its ugly parts, like the alleys where Donoughe said he encountered more rats and garbage than beautiful scenery. There’s an overdone quirkiness to the stereotype of the city as Pittsburghese and pierogis, and in Donoughe’s brush, a more tender, gentler Pittsburgh emerges.

The way Donoughe paints has an earnestness and softness to it. The textures are gestural and the work is stylized enough so as not to be totally photographically true-to-life, but they feel like they hold the essence of the places inside of them. In his artist statement, Donoughe writes: “As a detached observer for more than 43 years, I’ve come to appreciate how resilient people here are. Perhaps that is what I am looking for in my work: the authentic feeling that comes from knowing something is sturdy, well built, and made to last. Like Pittsburgh.”

The thing about a “way” versus an “alley” is that “way” feels hopeful—The title Ways of Pittsburgh feels like an incantation of hope. No matter where you turn in the city, you’ll find a way, eventually.

Ron Donoughe is holding his annual open studios on December 1 4-7PM and December 2 10-5PM at his studio on 208 Main Street.