Stump 1
oil on linen panel 20" x 24"
Stump 2
oil on linen panel 20" x 24"
" A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, some fantasy. When one always makes your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people."
Edgar Degas
While hiking through a fir and pine forest in western Maryland, hefting my backpack loaded with my painting box and supplies, heading for the rock cliffs along Muddy Creek Falls, I made a discovery. On the forest floor just off the trail, among the gigantic firs, there were a great number of ancient stumps and remnants of fallen trees. In various stages of decay, the great trunks dissolving into red-orange-brown soil and the stumps various shades of blue green moss and lichen and rotting wood. Some were hard or dry enough to stand up out of the decay were bleached cream color with streaks of orange and blue grey. They were incredible.
I never made it down the trail to the rocks and falls that day or on several more. I was enthralled by these relics, each one was evidence of the crashing down of giant trees in the past and the materials of new growth on the forest floor that they were becoming. The evidence of time compressed; past, present, future. Presented here are two examples of paintings wrestled from that forest - and I'm certain more will follow.
Edgar Degas
While hiking through a fir and pine forest in western Maryland, hefting my backpack loaded with my painting box and supplies, heading for the rock cliffs along Muddy Creek Falls, I made a discovery. On the forest floor just off the trail, among the gigantic firs, there were a great number of ancient stumps and remnants of fallen trees. In various stages of decay, the great trunks dissolving into red-orange-brown soil and the stumps various shades of blue green moss and lichen and rotting wood. Some were hard or dry enough to stand up out of the decay were bleached cream color with streaks of orange and blue grey. They were incredible.
I never made it down the trail to the rocks and falls that day or on several more. I was enthralled by these relics, each one was evidence of the crashing down of giant trees in the past and the materials of new growth on the forest floor that they were becoming. The evidence of time compressed; past, present, future. Presented here are two examples of paintings wrestled from that forest - and I'm certain more will follow.
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