From the West

24" x 20"

oil on panel

Inspired by my trip to New Mexico this summer, this painting has a lot of the Grand Canyon in it. My family did a small amount of hiking there as well as driving throughout New Mexico and a trip to Mesa Verde. It was my third or fourth trip to New Mexico and I am continually fascinated by the ruins of the Anscestral Puebloans, petroglyphs, and land formations/landscape.

From the West is a dialogue with the personal past (painted over another painting) and its thick texture resulted from this layering as well as through the use of chunky oil sticks. It has a compressed space, as if you are against a canyon wall or zooming close with a camera. The oranges change hue and tone, showing light and shade, defining rugged planes. The green square is not solid, so it comes to the surface and then seems to dwell with the rock, like the plants that grow in the dessert. The green substantiates that life can exist in seemingly inhospitable territory.

The Green Has It

oil on canvas

24" x 18"

The Green Has It is a funny painting. The stripes are curtain abstractions and the center is a view out a window. It owes much to Pierre Bonnard and one of his many window scenes, complete with striped wallpaper, curtains, light. I think much of my landscape painting has architectural references. They are nature influenced by a domestic view, like Bonnard (the sense of a window). They also often have the symmetry provided by the highway splitting the landscape into left and right when driving. Here there is more on the left than the right and it is a domestic picture, not the open road.

The yellow-green-blue goes through permutations but never bursts into orange or violet. There are a broad range of values, and paint-handling. This is a picture made by painting over another, this time an unresolved portrait. It was the right thing to do, a stronger statement.

Butterfly Window

oil on panel
24" x 18"

dry point (for the butterfly book, edition of 10)

The painting came first after a sketch. It is rather Matisse-like, bright, glowing color with black, flatly painted. My friend, the painter, Michelle Albert helped me with the printing technique. She did a bit of work in my studio while visiting me with her husband and daughter. I showed her plexiglass for dry point and basic supplies and she got a little time to herself to putter around. What she came up with surprised me - she spotted Akua-Kolor water based inks on the floor and used them monotype style with the oil based etching ink in the lines. It is always inspiring to see how someone else does something. I couldn't wait to try the technique myself because it is so painterly. To get painterly qualities in my prints I either make monotypes or hand-color etchings later. This was just what I was looking for! Sure enough, the lines were inky black and the areas of color were vibrant but not too flat. Every print I pull is pure joy. They have the feeling of rightness as when a painting comes together.

The black has a transparency to it and the location of the butterfly, either in front of or behind the window, is ambiguous. Maybe it is in the process of bursting through. The butterfly is a tangible, familiar life form, organic in contrast to the stark black and light pink architecture. The painting also has paint applied in washy areas, not completely flat solids, which energize the geometry. The butterflies are like dancers.

Curtains

oil on panel

24" x 18"

Another form of the square or the box in my work is this curtain. It is essentially a rectangle billowing in the breeze, inspired from a curtain hanging in a door of a stage at the Sterling Renaissance Festival in New York State. While waiting for the acrobat, Daniel, the Duke of Danger (GREAT act, by the way) I became instantly mesmerized by the form. That happens with me - sometimes images come in a flash, either imagined or triggered by something in view. I took out my sketchbook and studied the form in the wind, also intrigued by the darkness behind it. In reality the curtain was patterned, but in my painting I wanted to have it be white (it is white with grays made of green and pink). It retains a carnival feel, and I think I managed to capture the pull it had for me, an archetypal form. My first year of graduate school I painted three pictures of my grandmother hanging the laundry; only one was successful enough to keep. The figure held the ends of a sheet, attaching them to a clothesline. This billowing shape isn't new to me. It is interesting to forget about something and have it return. I look forward to seeing what else I've forgotten.