In 2020 I painted outside for the first time. It was enjoyable, challenging, educational, and started me down a path toward a subject matter I thought I’d never explore, landscapes.
I painted my first in the fall of 2020 on a local road lush fields, heather, edged by short trees. A beautiful but simple place where I could push paint around and interpret what I saw.
I began by laying on large areas of thin color, directly on the raw wood, soon, I abandoned my brush for a palette knife, with which I could push and smear the paint around, be less accurate in the details but catch the feeling of the whole scene. There was a road in my view, but I wanted the painting to be about nature and eliminated it.
Making pictures is to me, about choices, about form, space, color, a feeling, a sense of a thing. Trying to represent a thing I see or feel in a way that represents itself and what it might mean in terms of its color or design that is separate from what it is, maybe representing more than its physical being.
I’ve made a few landscapes, some inside, some out. When the weather cools again in a month I hope to go out again. In the meantime I’ll be in my small space, working on things seen and imagined. There are upcoming shows, and hopefully more to come. Stay tuned.
