NEW YORK.- Landscape artist John Laub, 57, died. He was born on December 30, 1947 in Philadelphia. He studied at the Tyler School of Art, the University of Pennsylvania, the San Francisco Art Institute, and the School of Visual Arts in New York, where he settled in the early 1980s. The very definition of a plein air painter, John Laub worked on site depicting river views, remote woodlands and summer retreats in the Adirondacks, Woodstock, NY, Mt. Desert Island in Maine, Martha's Vineyard and Fire Island. Inspired as a student by Fairfield Porter, Laub produced lyrical scenes that bridge the gap between realism and abstraction, artistic liberty and first hand perception. In a series of garden scenes, Laub employed rough-hewn, painterly strokes to imply the random tangle of a lush garden, suggesting an ecstatic calligraphy of leaves and stalks. In contrast, his winter scenes use cool swathes of fauve-like color and a rhythmic series of stable, vertical tree trunks to intimate a muted calm. Instead of literal transcriptions, Laub seeked to convey the vibrancy of color found within nature.