"Heading to another stretch of West 25th Street one can celebrate that part of Chelsea's diversity that I think is the genuine article, a painter Cezanne himself would have paused to admire: Peter Dickison is showing his landscape drawings and oils at the Prince Street Gallery. There is a certain kind of painter whose every work can stop you in your tracks from across the room. Dickison- who has been a protege of Nell Blaine, and who still is visibly in fealty to Cezanne, painting the same hilltown vistas and scraggy pines- has that kind of bell-ringing presence. His paintings are landscapes (usually with figures), viewed from a height and executed with the exhilaration imparted by mountain air.

Even when finished in the studio (as some are), Dickison's paintings retain a sense of hovering with helicopterish tension over pastoral vastness. Charles Burchfield was another American painter who painted this way, conveying not just the appearance of a particular scene but the vibration in the ground. Or rather, in the air. For it was Burchfield's wont (as it was Cezanne's) to paint the imagined Heraclitian fire all matter is composed of, to which purpose the flickering foliage of trees lends itself admirably, and which an artist's brushworkcan best hope to emulate. Indeed, every good landscapist makes his mark, so to speak, by finding a signature solution to the problem of rendering foliage. Alex Katz lately found his distinctive shorthand for greenery, and Dickison has his, no less solidly pondered.

The human presences in Dickison 's landscapes. both clothed and nude, are emblematic of the way we are to inhabit nature, of how the "ego" is to be fit into "Et in Arcadia ego." Dickison's most telling figure in this regard is the young man halfway up a tree in one of his smaller oils, "The Baron in the Tree" (named after the tale by Italo Calvino). At first glance you might not even notice him; at second glance, he offers a faunish wink, a Peter Panish way of telling us that he can fly, that paintingis a way of doing that, that it lifts one to his mid-tree height from which all the valley below is spread out like a map. To survey Dickison's show is to be reminded that for many painters landscape has always been the surest (if steepest) road to transcendance, the jointure of blue heaven and umber earth."