The Neighbor's Shed

36" x 24"

oil on panel

Okay, you might notice this is a fall painting when we are in winter. I did an oil pastel of the view out one of my studio windows and this is a painting done from the drawing. I think the dots are kind of perky, not in a bubblegum snapping teenager way, but in a playful way. Rather than crunching leaves, one feels as if it is possible to bounce on the treetops like with moonboots. This playfulness is a quality that keeps the work, harkening back to Pointillism, from being dry and redundant. A fellow student in art school complained on our trips to the museum that it was "like going to a cemetery. It is full of dead art by dead artists." Perhaps some artists might agree, maybe those trying to find the cutting edge. For me the art is timeless while of its time, as full of life as Mozart is today.
The neighbors put up a new shed and it creeped into my work. The Post-Impressionists found Impressionism limiting because the short marks didn't lend themselves to clearly defining form. It was almost a focusing problem. Cezanne delineated form, but I think his bathers walked the line. I didn't want to make the thin trees out of dots and used line with dots weaving in and out of them. I see so many variations in the color of what I am looking at that I am not always content to make one or two stand for all, thus this pixelization. This painting makes me think of Pissarro, especially one at the Guggenheim, The Hermitage at Pontoise, where I studied how he handled paint. His work strikes me as quieter than a lot of the other Impressionists, a little less bang, but the paintings are very thoughtful, carefully and beautifully seen and made. If you check out this painting: Landscape at Chaponval, you can see what I admire about his treatment of houses in a landscape. I like the way they are nestled there, part of the patterning of the picture with the greenery coming in front of, behind, and through. Imagine what would have happened if he had heard rock 'n' roll?!