Medium: Oil Painting
As a landscape painter I am forever taking in my surroundings and drawing inspiration from what I see. There is something about the craggy texture and shape of a mountain range, the mysterious depths of a body of water, and the color rich drama of a skyscape that sets me in motion in an endless quest to explore and express form and color through painting.
I paint both “en plein air” and in my studio. With plein air painting the challenge is to capture the spontaneity of a moment in time before it slips irretrievably into non-existence. My work is typically done on small canvases and completed the same day. In contrast, painting in my studio affords me the opportunity to create larger, more complex works of art. I allow myself the freedom to work from my mind’s eye, memory, photographs and from my plein air studies, rephrasing and embellishing the natural elements of a scene into a composition that represents both imagination and reality. I tend to work on several pieces at once, using the luxury of time to deeply engage in a dialog with each painting and myself.
My work is exclusively oil based not only because of its silky smooth texture and intensity but also because there is something completely exhilarating about moving oil around the canvas. Oil is gutsy and bold; a natural choice for creating luminous, vibrant, color saturated works. Additionally, I have begun to move away from toning the canvas. I find that a non-toned canvas lets me capture the whiteness of billowy clouds and the ethereal fragility of a skyscape at sunset and sunrise.
Painting for me is a type of meditation, an opportunity to pay homage to the magnificent beauty of the natural environment and to interact with that beauty in an act of creation. The languid movement of clouds, the ever-changing light that illuminates our surroundings and shifts the colors of a landscape as the sun makes its daily journey across the sky beckons me to capture this grace on canvas. It seems only natural to express my sense of fascination and my appreciation for the natural world with brush stroke and color, and in this I am infinitely rewarded with a sense of joy and satisfaction that never diminishes. The subjects I paint allow me to stop, look around, and appreciate how truly breathtaking this earth really is. I want to take the viewer with me, to a place out of time, where we lose ourselves in observation and are enveloped by the brilliance of the natural world.
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