Spring #6 (Before the Rain)

18" x 24"

oil on panel

Sometimes I dot, sometimes I don't.

I saw this while taking my son to school in the morning. The blue and pink are both sky and the gray is road, but it doesn't have to be interpreted as such. We passed a pink flowering tree on the left, which I think is a dogwood (I don't really know trees) and a dark, purple/red/black maple on the right. There is a duality about them, the light and dark and placement in opposition, like the Yin-Yang. The pink tree is similar to the feeling of cherry trees which are celebrated here in the Washington D.C. National Cherry Blossom Festival and in Japan. In Buddhism, the cherry tree blossoms symbolize the fleeting nature of life. In contemporary Japanese culture, the cherry blossom can even be found in tattoos symbolizing women's beauty and sexuality. A classic image is this one by Hiroshige.

The trees flank center stage to reveal the area of central importance, atmospheric, beyond reach yet there.

Spring #4 (View of Central Park from the 21st Floor)

oil on canvas

36" x 42"

The artists Sigmar Polke and Roy Lichtenstein used Benday dots in their paintings as employed by printers (Lichtenstein modeled his work specifically after comics). I'm not so interested in the regularity of that method as I like the quirkiness of my hand as well as the option to change scale. The location of the dots is important to the space in the work. Think Cezanne, Giacometti, and Mondrian mapping space. Their playfulness as compared to a mechanized look make them more Polka than Benday and also differ from the seriousness of the aforementioned artists. I also do not want to limit myself to very saturated colors (spaced differently to appear like more of a range) as is often the case with the Benday dots, preferring to mix more, which works better with the larger dots. Mondrian, while not a dot painter, reduced his palette to the primaries. He found the problem of working with red, yellow, blue, as well as black and white very complex, changing the size and placement of rectangles and squares in order to create a vision resulting from this interplay.

In Spring #4 dots expand on a white ground, showing the bursting energy of the city and the green treetops of Central Park.

Spring 2 (View From the Cobblestone School Playground)

oil on canvas

24" x 20"

I really like this purple house sitting beyond the green.

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The paint gets very thick when I paint over old paintings. It reminds me of the Californian painter Jess as well as passages of heavily layered gouache (opaque watercolor) in the paintings of African-American artist Horace Pippin (1888 - 1946). There isn't a lot of air in Jess' paintings; they seem locked in, constructed of bumpy jigsaw pieces. Many of Pippin's paintings depict the bleak interiors of African-American homes he experienced in his lifetime. He frequently used flat shapes but his space is often airy however stark the scene. What I am talking about is very physical. I am beginning to work on clay reliefs which naturally connect to this idea. They will appear here if I am able to pull it off.

My physical and airy painting, Spring 2 (View from the Cobblestone School Playground), is exuberant. It is the moment when all of Rochester is altered into collective cheer at the sight of green. The grass is green first, which means the leaves are soon to follow. Old buildings that looked dingy under gray skies now sparkle in the sun. It has the excitement of Dippin' Dots (frozen tiny balls of ice cream that look like Styrofoam pellets) at the amusement park. Although totally artifice as the loud circles proclaim, it generates strong feeling. The form of the landscape is changed to mirror emotion.

I think the dots can sometimes be like a kind of collecting, think bottle caps, stamps, buttons. When I was a girl my passion was stickers. For years my allowance went to magical eye-candy that I loved to organize (this zeal for page layout may have served me well in many graphic design scenarios, but has recently intensely resurfaced through an innocent-looking recipe organizer given to me by a friend). I collected until adolescence, at which time I promptly gave them all, numbering in the thousands, to a woman with two daughters younger than me. It was an impractical past-time as a well-meaning aunt expressed, "All it is is a shiny piece of paper," a quote I remember from over twenty-five years ago. Blasphemy! She didn't understand the brain buzz (play Zynga's Scramble if you want a taste), the visual information I could process, finding comparisons and contrasts in shape, color, scale, texture, and sometimes even scent (scratch and sniffs were prizes given by my teachers). It is one kind of intelligence, which I often use to explain why the math section of my brain is the size of a raisin. Some kids were practicing piano, others dance or baseball, while my independent investigations of paper and design were in preparation to create this Dippin' Dots picture for you. Yum.

Spring 1 and Spring 3 (Favorite Green Space)

oil on panel
12" x 12"



Spring 2 is coming (spring itself is already here)! These two worked best together for a post.

The sky in the painting is more subtle and has lighter areas than in this reproduction. The sky and grass are very high-key in this as in the original, while the woods are in that neutral-budding-just-before-leaves state. Marks are loose and help show the space and growth patterns of the woods. The top green and bottom blue, both very saturated, are visual bookends. The curve of the lower green band is lyrical and comforting, like gentle waves or lying on your sofa. It's a funny painting because it has serenity as well as the snap of a ping-pong ball, blue on one side, green on the other. Spring is like that, lovely yet energetic. The sky and grass were both really that bright, done from sight from my studio window. Without the treatment of the center, they look like David Hockney's palette, hyperactive, not quite naturalistic.

Spring 3 (Favorite Green Space) is a block away from my house. I'm in farmland with corn, sheep, horses, cows, and unfortunately veal calves tied to their little shelters their whole lives, all on the same road. The green hill takes up three-fourths or so of the rectangle and obscures the bottoms of the trees. I look forward to the moment it comes into sight when I'm driving back home; in the bright sun it gives me a rush (some people get that when looking at Matthew McConaughey, not that I don't...). In those last two sentences you get the formal elements of design backing my work, visual perception, emotional resonance, and let's not forget sensuality (paint is very sensual, as nerdy as that may sound). There is my recipe. It's the winging it kind.

Primary Window (Early Spring)

oil on panel

24" x 18"

I love Matisse's Window at Tangier painted in Morocco in 1912. It is the type of window that opens in, which becomes the side panel of the painting. The painting deals with this rectangle of pink, the pinks and oranges in the view to the red-orange vase with flowers on the sill, and the blues including the large rectangle at the top. Paint is dappled in areas to reflect light. The title is due to its primary color composition of blue, red, and yellow (three central bands). It's what your eye wants to see, after all.

Primary Window (Early Spring) is frontal. Whites and grays frame it from bright on the left to dark on the sill. The colors aren't very exaggerated; it is a day of bright blue sky, bleached grass uncovered from snow, and bare trees more pink than brown. Vertical ripples of the curtains bracket the woods, drawn like the colors shimmer. The lightness of the colors and the paint handling make it airy. Vital are the space between the trees, their rhythm, as does the way the treetops mingle with sky.

Landscape consists of objects: rocks, trees, whatever, the place in the space they inhabit, and that space, coexistence, interdependence. I like seeing the connection between these named things and their context (colors isolated and interacting is the same idea). It is difficult to see oneself that way, maybe impossible. We try to see ourselves, our connections to each other and the world through photographs, Facebook, Google Earth. I think they are all good tools for trying to grasp this thing that can't be held. Sticking one's hand in dirt is another way, a relief to feel something real. Reverend Scott Taylor of the First Unitarian Universalist Church in Rochester describes the mystery between people almost as a force, as God if you are a believer in God. He seems to stick more to just the idea of mystery and something that's there but you don't know what it is; he has a hand gesture to describe it. I think this mystery or energy between people is the same as what I see in the landscape. Lots of people "see it", feel it; I'm just trying to paint it. For that matter, lots of people have tried and continue to try to make art about it. It is what makes painting so difficult, almost daunting at times, but draws one back over and over to engage in the impossible obsession of trying to nail it. Plenty of painters wouldn't have this agenda and would say that they are just trying to make a good picture, Pop Artists, for example. Western Modern Art from the beginning of the twentieth century through today reflects the ideas of Western Society, including religion. Artists ranged in their beliefs from a singular, all-powerful Creator as defined by Christianity and Judaism, to Atheism and everything in between. Painting is a spiritual/religious practice for me. As an undergrad I read Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual in Art which also delved into his ideas about color theory. I don't think there are many great books written since on the subject (let me know if you know of any!) because it is such an intangible area. I'll just keep making tangible things about the intangible and shut up like most painters do.