Folding Chairs

16" x 22"

oil on canvas

This one was done in a one shot demo for a class of high school students a few years back - I just came upon it in the studio a couple of weeks ago and today it just seemed a good break from the winter posts of late. I've been thinking a lot about the processes involved with making paintings and choosing subjects and my teaching - I'm retiring very soon (after 32) years to paint full time and a lot of stuff is churning up in my head. I keep coming back to something I find I'm often saying to my A.P. Studio students when they question me about color schemes or composition or any other of a dozen things in their work - I turn their questions back on them by asking -"what are you in love with here? What is the star of the show? What simple wonder are you bringing back to show us?" Just as this painting is not about folding chairs but instead is about the light and shadow as it carves repeated similarities in shape and space and directional angles and creates a battle between foreground and background / negative and positive space - we can discover what all painting is really about - the experience of a visual exploration and the record it leaves for others to explore. I think more than subject, style, or effect - painting has to have its origin in what Avigdor Arhika called "the integrity of every mark" - what each work must be"about". That humble task of exploration without concern for product - discovering what I love about being alive and attempting to paint that joy- will be my concern as I move from daily teacher to a daily painter.

Two December Trees

oil on canvas

20" x 24"

These two giants stand guard over our home and I wish I had a nickel for each time I've just gazed up at their massive structure in awe - at any time of year. In winter though, the bare bones are revealed and the gestural quality as they sway and reach far above me is amazing.

December Stream

oil on panel

6" x 8"

The same place more or less where many of these paintings occur - beavers have created this little pool of freezing water and another beyond. The chaos along the left bank made up of fallen saplings and mud and ice and snow and the reflecting pool of ice skim and water all set off the light up on the right - hand bank. A real gamble of a painting that seems (to me) to work while staying as loose as I dare. This is how I love to work.

Slow Melt

oil on panel

8" x 10"

This one was done on one of those days right after a light snow and the temps went up and slowly the ice and snow began to shrink away from the grasses - I love the blonde and orange grass and pine needles against the cold light and shadow of the snow. Captures a moment in time by compressing an hour or so.

Autumn Treetops

Autumn Treetops

oil on canvas

5" x 10"

This little one came out of a blustery, cool fall day and the waving trees were still holding on to most of the foliage. Place and time and the immediacy of being and trying to grab hold of all that - that is the subject of the work always - the subject is simply the trigger.

Comments!

Hello everyone - be sure to leave comments about the work - I'm hoping to establish a dialogue among painters and folks who love paintings - kind of a virtual artist's cafe. Go ahead, help start the ball rolling - and thanks for visiting.

Autumn Creek

oil on panel

9" x 7"

"Its alright to let yourself go as long as you can let yourself back."

Mick Jagger

The trick, when painting outdoors, is that there are no tricks. Everything is in flux and there are no shortcuts and no formulae. Only the exploration of the truth. This is what attracts me most of the time, this absence of repetition or certainty. One must relearn the whole thing all over again as one tries to let go of preconception or knowledge. It is this plunging -in while abandoning the worry of result or product that frees the painter to the total absorption in the moment, the light, the space, the energy. It is discovering an approach to physics from the non-mathematical side of things. The reassurance comes from knowing of others who have gone before along the lines of a similar quest.

"A minute in the world's life passes!
To paint it in its reality and forget everything for that!

To become that minute." Paul Cezanne

Down the Road

7" x 10"

oil on canvas

Tangled bramble roses and weeds along roadside ditches on a November day warmer than expected. There is a poetry to be found down there on the rough edge of an old farm. The visual tension between the tangle and the escaping road is enough to keep me occupied and the risk of ending up with nothing is enough of a trigger the painting. Some days I will pace and wander and drive the pick-up all over searching for just such a moment. Often it is a sideways, 'out of the corner of my eye' thing that brings me to a halt.

"Lord: it is time. The summer was immense.

Lay your shadow on the sundials

and let loose the wind in the fields."

Ranier Maria Rilke

Woods in November

oil on canvas

A breezy and crisp day with the last of the leaves hanging on. Folks are always suggesting scenic places that "I would just love to paint"... or so they assume. Its probably more about what they would like to paint I guess. Willem deKooning is quoted as saying "the best we can hope for is to bring some order to ourselves." I think, in his broken english, he was talking about an understanding of ourselves as measured against life's struggles and confusions.  Along that line, I'm much more drawn to something like the chaos of this little patch of woods as the sun light breaks up among fluttering leaves and bending trees and the tangle of light and shadow, leaf and branch all cry for attention. On such a day one feels time fleeing before winter's approach and how precious every moment is. These are the things I am attracted toward when attempting to make a painting, wrestling some understanding out of the visual cacophany of living things - finding a little order within myself as I struggle to understand what I see.

Island in the Stream

oil on panel

6.75" x 12"

"If you trust in Nature, in the small Things that hardly anyone sees and that can so suddenly become huge, immeasurable; if you have this love for what is humble and try very simply, as someone who serves,
to win the confidence of what seems poor:
then everything will become more coherent and somehow more reconciling,
not in your conscious mind perhaps,

which stays behind, astonished, but in your innermost awareness."

Ranier Maria Rilke

Single Tree

oil on panel

6" x 10"

Like a dancer caught in a pose, this tree stood where a fence line once ran on a deserted farm near our home. A lovely, quiet spot in the rolling hills of Virginia's piedmont.

November Oak

oil on canvas

16" x 22"

When we first came to live in the old church, I was just blown away by the ancient old oaks that stood guard all around our little home. They towered over us and swayed with the wind and shaded the entire acre and a half and were almost too immense to comprehend. So I set up my french easel out under them and began painting, looking up at the cold late autumn sky through the muscular branches. I never tire of them and when I'm feeling blocked or unsatisfied with my work I find I can go back to this source and rediscover what my painting needs to be about - light and space and place and form. This one dates from our first year or two there, maybe 1986.