BY AMY J. BARRY

"Land Alive," the title of Joan Levy Hepburn's new show, which opened at both New London's TSETSE Gallery and Union Railroad Station on Aug. 6, couldn't be a more evocative description of the artist's landscapes.

Deep, lush, and green, the viewer is not merely observing paintings on a wall but is walking through a twisty moss-carpeted path, along a cool blue stream, past vibrantly alive trees and plants and the dry broken ghosts of fallen limbs. In Hepburn's more myopic views, one can feel the delicate velvety pink bloom of a forest orchid, the slippery smooth Jack-in-the-Pulpit unfolding on a damp forest floor.

Many of the paintings in the shows are Hepburn's interpretations of the magnificent wooded landscape that surrounds her at Art at Murray Pond in Killingworth, a private nature preserve where she resides and offers classes, workshops, and retreats. Other paintings are inspired by mountainous and stormy Western landscapes.

The centerpiece of the Union station exhibition is three 48- by 48-inch panels painted in graphite, oil pastel, and collage, titled "September 11 Tryptych." This is only the second time it has been on public view, and the high ceilings and large space of the station makes it an ideal backdrop for this powerful work.

Hepburn painted the triptych after visiting Ground Zero a few days after the World Trade Center towers fell, in order to process the event. She says she had never gone into the towers, which were completed in 1972 when she graduated high school.

"I always had a feeling that they weren't permanent," she says.

The fire was still burning and gray ash covered everything when she

arrived at the site.

"The palette of the landscape

reminded me of the platinum colored part of Yellowstone where steam and sulphur are emitted from the ground, and the spirits of the first Americans are present," Hepburn notes.

All of her subjects, she stresses, "are painted from the inside-out."

"When the subject is fully perceived by all the senses and intellect of the artist, the artwork is born into the physical world and available to the viewer as Nature," she explains in her artist statement. "As the human body, mind, and spirit is part of all Nature, this approach to drawing and painting is existential. It documents the experience of being alive."

Mentored by a Master

A fateful day in 1970 shaped the path Hepburn's art would take. While a student at the Buxton School in Williamsburg, Mass.-a small private high school focused on the arts-Willem De Kooning (1904-1997), the renowned Dutch-American abstract expressionist painter was visiting his daughter, a student at the school. He spotted one of Hepburn's paintings hanging in the dining room and said he wanted to meet the person who painted it. Hepburn was just 15 years old.

"He took me under his wing and said if I ever wanted to talk about painting, to call him up and reverse the charges," Hepburn recalls. "I'd call him and talk to him for two hours at a time and went to his studio in East Hampton-it was filled with light and paintings."

Hepburn says DeKooning presuaded her to study with him instead of going to college, although years later she attended the Kansas City Art Institute where she received a Bachelors of Fine Arts.

"He was 50 years older than me but treated me as though we were on the exact same level," Hepburn recalls. "He was so generous and supportive. I knew I had expressionistic tendencies, but I didn't know how to use it. I had to go out of my way not to paint [like him] but find my own voice."

Hepburn says she found that vehicle for expressing her voice in 1984 when she moved to Killingworth and plugged into the landscape.

"It was a total mess," she says of the 10-acre property. "I cleared the land, designed and built the [art center]. There were beautiful outcroppings of ledge and moss, a pond, and a bog. I got rid of the 'visual unwanteds' so I could see the pure visual form and make paintings of it."

Hepburn paints outdoors year round, donning a "skidoo suit" in the winter to stay warm. She also paints from 2 a.m. until sunrise when there's a full moon.

"I like painting in the middle of the night when the rest of the world is asleep and you hear all those night sounds," she says.

Hepburn works primarily in oil, pastel, and graphite and she likes to work large-scale.

"You can really go into the painting-the dynamics of physicality," she says.

In her introduction to the exhibition catalogue, art critic and author Nouritza Matossian says of Hepburn: "In Joan's work we have the culmination of a lifelong engagement which has taken her to the summit. She is unique among American artists and is a 'maestra de los maestros.' I look at her new work and I am no longer struck by the thought that Joan the wood sprite has become nature; in her compelling towering canvases nature has become Joan Levy Hepburn."