Where The Light Comes From

Where The Light Comes From
30 x 30 oil on linen

This painting is a commission for a young family living on a farm and raising sheep and chickens. Once a Christmas tree farm, they cut 100 of the now towering trees yearly to clear the land. The couple wanted a painting of a stand of majestic Hickory trees and as luck would have it, I went to see the trees on one of the last days of full foliage, before all the leaves were blown off in an October storm. The light was low and coming through the bases of the old pines, glowing a deep golden-green and silhouetting the trees so they looked like lead on a stained glass window. The Hickory trees themselves were old friends, and they had grown together in an accommodating way. As I painted them I could see how carefully and generously they had allowed room for each other’s healthy growth, and there were curves that started in one tree and continued on into the next and the next, all oriented like hands outreached to the life giving sun. The homeowners referred to this part of their property as ‘The Cathedral’, and after painting it, I understood why.

The Overlook 48 x 48

Ah, patience, faith and courage…traits in high demand when attempting a very large painting. The Overlook is a painting of two trees on a little bluff overlooking the bay south of Cape Ann. Fitst, the disappearing bush. It was there, but it just didn;t help so I removed it. Strangely it’s absence is hardly noticeable, so good move. Then I wrestled with how to express the sparsely leaved tree on the rightI left it bare at first, but then it looked dead, and that wasn’t the point: alive/dead. I was more interested in how the two trees were interacting, three actually, because there are two trees on the left. They are intertwined. Then how to show the blaze of light on the water? I at first painted the sky colors darker, to let the light on the water be the brightest, but it didn’t work, the sky just looked dirty. So I wrestled with all that too and finally, finally came to a place where it seemed light and whole.

Waldeinsamkeit

Can’t see the woods for the trees….

If you can't see the wood for the trees, you can't see the whole situation clearly because you're looking too closely at small details.

This is actually the main premise behind a class I am currently teaching, and it is funny or appropriate or ironic that I couldn’t see the woods for the trees in my own painting, Waldeinsamkeit, which is a German word that describes the sublime feeling one has while being alone in the woods. My first mistake was incorporating gold in the wrong places, because using big patches of gold in the sky shapes literally and figuratively broke the forest. The feeling of the trees working cooperatively together to form a canopy was lost. What’s more, the blue half light on the rocks were reflecting cool blues in the sky…so why then was the sky a warm gold? It didn’t make actual or pictoral sense. To further hold me back, the gold itself is ‘precious’— it’s costly, and trying to preserve it at the expense of the painting as a whole was a mistake. The relief I felt in painting out the gold in the sky was immediate and telling. It just felt right. Now the forest is a canopy of greengold light. The falling arcing shapes bring your eye down to the tree trunks that reflect the sun in a shower of light. From there your eye falls on the half light of the warm ochre greens on the brook, moving forward along the shapes in the brook to the anchor rock on the bottom right and from there back to the top. I moved the river out o the right too, it just felt good to do that. It was this feeling of a canopy of light, the security and peacefulness of it, the perfect wholeness of it all, that I was trying to express, and to do that I had to sacrifice the big shapes of gold in the sky.

Collaboration Painting: The Kissing Gouramis

The Kissing Gouramis

The hive mind. At the Open Studios in Amesbury this past weekend, roughly 40 people contributed their artistic skills to a formidable 48 x 48 inch canvas. The artists ranged in age from 6 to 80. We mixed colors to be used, starting with cool grayblues and grayviolets nad using the largest 4” brushes, and over the two days, introduced warmer, darker and more vibrant colors three at a time while also reducing the sizes of the brushes. The last hour we used lots and lots and lots of glitter over the most saturated colors using very small brushes. The title refers to the two kissing fish ‘gouramis’ at the top middle of the canvas.

Over the 9 hours this painting was created, people became more and more excited about the painting, and towards the end, it was organized chaos. The result though, everyone agreed, was really quite amazing.

Thanks to Ali, B. Elizabeth, Cooper, Daryl, Emilie, John, Julia, Kelly, Kendra, Lily, Matthew, Matthais, Meg, Mindy, Mirabelle, Ofer, Rachel, Randye, Rebekah and all the other artists who created this work of art.

The painting will be donated to the Amesbury Cultural Council.

Forgiving Tree

From the Acadia National Park Jessup Path Series. This tree kindly leans out of the way for other trees and by luck, passers by too. It always amazes me to see— as I paint inch by inch over the canvas— the way living things accommodate one another, giving each other needed space, sun and air. There is cooperation at work in a forest, hence the title, Forgiving Tree. I connected the tree limbs between the left tree leaning in and the leaning tree itself…a devise to visually keep it from falling over.

Path in the Sun

In painting, as in life, holding it together is not always easy. Things–compositions–are always threatening to fall apart and a painter’s task is to figure out how it all fits, keep a movement going through the painting, find pathways for the eye, and then keep the viewer’s interest for more than 5 seconds. I do not lie. Think about how long you look at a painting when you are at a museum or gallery. One one thousand, two one thousand…five seconds is along time! Anything longer is like hitting a home run. The bright bowl of light in the foreground is balanced with bright spots in the birch trees and in the far field, and I found a subtle, but weighty visual anchor point at the end of the path where it subtly hangs a right.

Shelter

Shelter took me on a wild ride, as I struggled to figure out how to put it all together without making the viewer dizzy. So many layers of landscape, and only one layer of paint. It is an image of a place, but it is also craft, an object made of cloth and paint, each brushstroke necessary and painted with the purpose of fitting together and describing the exact color of that tree, that limb-full of leaves, that particular part of the sky peeking through the leaves. Maintaining the integrity of the picture plane, while simultaneously expressing the mosaic of the color of living things in the blue air…that’s my holy grail. It is a difficult, but that is what painters do. There were some swirling motions that became too insistent and overtook the composition, so I had to add small stops, small brushstrokes to break the lines. Note: the color shifts are are result of changing light in my studio…it tells you how much light has to do with the color of paint!

Headwaters

Here is a progression of my most recent painting Headwaters, 36" x 36". After doing a full charcoal drawing, fixed with retouch varnish, I began painting in the top left corner, working in a clockwise fashion from there. My biggest mistake was painting the rock face on the mid left too dark. It threw off the feeling of illuminated dark and I had to scrape out a days work and repaint it.  Some swearing was involved, and faith that good things come with time. This idea of being your own harshest critic, and a willingness to undo work that has been done, is one of the least enjoyable parts of being an artist, but it is absolutely essential to producing your best work. I am happy with the results. This painting will be part of a solo exhibit called "Lit" at the Newburyport Art Association, opening April 17th at 6 PM. 

Soul of Time

The title of this painting, Soul of Time, here in three stages from start to finish, came to me in a dream. It sounds pretentious I'm afraid, and I think a simpler title might be better...then I googled it and found this poem. The last two lines describe a feeling I think all artists have.  

Soul of Time
by Trumbull Stickney (1874–1904)

TIME’S a circumference
Whereof the segment of our station seems
A long straight line from nothing into naught.
Therefore we say “ progress, “ “ infinity “ —
Dull words whose object
Hangs in the air of error and delights
Our boyish minds ahunt for butterflies.
For aspiration studies not the sky
But looks for stars; the victories of faith
Are soldiered none the less with certainties,
And all the multitudinous armies decked
With banners blown ahead and flute before
March not to the desert or th’ Elysian fields,
But in the track of some discovery,
The grip and cognizance of something true,
Which won resolves a better distribution
Between the dreaming mind and real truth
I cannot understand you.
‘T is because
You lean over my meaning’s edge and feel
A dizziness of the things I have not said.

Painting's Progress

Here is a few images of a recent painting in progress that are pretty self explanatory. The drawing shows the thinking. One curve in the water answers another, and there is an overall circular composition. One change I made to the photo composition was to move the forward-most sail back, so that the shoulder of the crew in front connected to the far shore. This serves to simplify the composition and connect foreground to background, flattening the space.

What do I know?

Not much, and quite a lot. Painting is like life—the more you learn the less you know—because conflicting ideas and a broad mind make one less certain. Still, there are ideas about painting worth sharing. In this monthly blog I will attempt to put into words what I am working on both in my studio and in the class I teach- the thought process and the craft processes involved. There is so many moving parts in being a professional artist, and no easy way to learn it all at once, but with passion, perseverance and an optimistic outlook, you can do it.