Field I

18" x 24"


oil on panel

I am always enthralled by aerial views; a teacher from art school always pushed us to vie for the window seat. I am particularly into rural landscape and its design of rectangular, patchwork pieces. Field I is rather singular in its central, brown area. The earth color has many variations and is crossed by undulating, thin, green lines, like a musical staff. While in graduate school I painted a series based on Beethoven's Symphony Number 6, know as the Pastoral Symphony. Nature and art are both rhythmic (design elements in art can bounce your eye around a piece in a tempo which contributes to your interpretation). I recently listened to Johnny Cash's song, Get Rhythm. To quote Wikipedia,"The song is about optimism, centering on a shoeshine boy who "gets rhythm" to cope with the tedious nature of his job." Rhythm and optimism can go hand-in-hand, and I think of the reassurance many people say they feel from the certainty and natural order in math. I think musicians feel it when notes are hit at the right time, dancers when movements are in sync to music, a batter when the bat hits the ball. The painting's subject, a field, is emblematic of growth as well as the labor that goes into cultivating change. Jasper Johns painted the American Flag. He took a symbol that was loaded with content and worked on its surface as a painting, which is different than taking a subject like a field, and painting it into a flag/emblem. Still, Johns made his painting iconic of American Painting and his picture goes beyond being a picture of something to being inseparable from the object that is depicted. In any case, with all the green around it, Field I is my own flag of optimism.