|
Home
The artist Edward Hopper once made a
statement concerning the lively future of American Painting, "Painting
must deal with life and nature's phenomena to become great". This is the
underlying theme that I acknowledge to be the spring board of my work. I
am deeply and personally committed to the unique expression of nature in
order to understand and redefine our connective web of human experience.
In the traditional artistic vision of the landscape we are constantly
reminded of the uniqueness of place, intimacy of nature, and or the
vastness of space. For me, landscape is an arena where the attitudes,
concerns and methods of civilization show clearly upon the treatment of
its surface. The locations or views that I paint are consciously meant
to become important spiritual places. In D.H. Lawrence's
Studies in Classic American Literature, he states, "different
places on the face of the earth have different vital effluence,
different vibrations, different chemical exhalation, different polarity,
with different stars. Call it what you like. But the Spirit of Place is
a great reality".
Many of us are familiar with well known places of spirit or rather
sacred places; these sites include Stonehenge, the Great Pyramids, Machu
Pichu and the Cathedral at Chartres. But sacred sites do not have to be
famous locations they can be found everywhere; we have collective sacred
places and personal ones as well. Each of these has common
characteristics by which we experience the shift of consciousness. All
we have to do is walk up to or into a place-location and if we exhibit
even the slightest bit of openness, we begin to feel different, more
than ourselves. We feel physically at one with everything around us and
with the whole of creation, a sensation that fills us with inner
security and well-being and even wisdom.
Also important to me, in an elemental sense, are the skills of
observation, the perfect pitch of color, and the dynamic organization of
the image on the canvas or paper. My style dances between
painterly realism and expressionistic naturalism. The studies and
a few larger finished paintings are created on location. It is critical
that I participate in the meeting, the "real living" of my personal
sacred places. Later in the studio I reference these studies along
with photos, sketches and slides to flesh out the wholeness, harmony and
radiance of these collective metaphors as they are retranslated to
larger sized canvases.
My paintings are invitations to reflection and are meant as a
contribution towards our "self-knowledge" rather than a strategy for the
public veneration of nature. It is not my desire to express a blatant
dogma, or political statement on the viewer about human relationship to
landscape; instead I seek to display a visual eye for the viewer's
personal revelation or insight.
"It is in vain to dream of wildness distant from ourselves. There is
none such. It is the bog in our brain and bowels, the primitive vigor of
Nature in us, that inspires that dream."
Journal of Henry David Thoreau, August 30, 1856
|