Landscapes

I enjoy getting outside to take landscape photos. Viewing a scene as a possible painting makes me more mindful of the natural world than I think I would be otherwise. Once I’m immersed in the outdoors, I realize how essential the experience is for feeling inspired and rejuvenated. Back in the studio, I use the photographic record more as a guide to the mood of the scene, and then a jumping off place from which to begin to invent, often adding and subtracting elements and changing the colors.

Running concurrently with the meditative mood of calm elicited by a landscape, there is the awareness that everything is also in constant flux, from the breeze moving the clouds, down to the atoms from which everything is made. These dualistic qualities of serenity and excited movement are something I strive to capture in my paintings.

With landscapes, I am dealing with the formal issues of abstract forms, negative space, perspective, composition, surface, color harmonies, and light and shadow. These issues make the framework but are subordinate to trying to evoke a sensual and emotional feeling.

Technically, I sometimes use oil paint over a base of acrylic paint and a mixture of gels and modeling paste on wood panels. After making an underpainting of random marks and flat colors, I build up layers of textured paint with a palette knife and sometimes apply a belt sander to the surface of the painting. Then the final painting is done with layers of oil paint. This adding and subtracting, covering and uncovering provides nuances of color and allows the history of successive layers to interact with one another like the changing play of light and shadows over the land. Sometimes I go in directly with oil paint that might have wax or marble dust added to increase the texture of the paint.