September Woods
oil on panel 9" x 12"
"True painting always tends towards the impossible sum
of the present moment, the past, and the future."
Nicolas DeStael
Coming to grips with the chaotic visual stimulus found in nature is a large part of figuring out how to paint. I have never been interested in scenes or views - and while there are maybe hundreds of painters here in the States doing well while recording or illustrating the great mountains and shimmering lakes of the Rockies or the surf crashed cliffs of California - these things have never triggered me to paint them. I am drawn instead toward the rough fringes rural places where they bump against the populated and developed; the tangled wood's edge, the fallow fields, the junkyard or the collapsed buildings. I guess part of the attraction is to be left alone to deal with these things, un-jostled by tourists or painting clubs. Wherever I am or whatever my subject, the only way to organize an approach toward "the impossible sum" of past, present, and future that must be compressed into a painting, is to stop and look and discover the poetry of the moment and place.
"September Woods" is a small section of the edge of a copse of trees somewhere in Maine. Nondescript and easily passed by this place is nothing special - except that it holds everything vital and beautiful about life on a sun drenched day. Shadow and light, color and space organized by the dancing vertical tree trunks moving forward and back, amongst the diagonal tumble of light as it falls on clusters of leaves and grasses. The painting exists as simple evidence of one attempt at the impossible, pitted against one painter's limits,
fueled by the joy experienced in the attempt.
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