Pastel Summer Landscape #1 and #2

24" x 18"

oil pastel on paper

Pastels are very direct and have an immediate energy that is often different from painting. These have the rhythm of growing things. The dots convey the exuberance of perfect summer days and expectations of the harvest. Like watercolor and drawing in general, the paper showing through functions as connective tissue between all the elements of the picture, making harmony and adding to the presence of light. I like the planar aspects of the fields simultaneously perpendicular and parallel to the tree line.

Mary Cassatt (American 1844-1926) described the fabric and background of her chalk pastel, Mother Playing with Child, 1897. [www. MaryCassatt.org is a great site of her complete works.] The faces are more tightly rendered. Delacroix's 1850 pastel, Sunset, enjoys the horizontal colored bands of landscape. Degas' 1892 Landscape, monotype heightened with pastel, is soft, focusing on the atmosphere of a scene from a distance almost from the point of view of a hot air balloon. My pastels are bolder, more visceral. Cassatt liked to repeatedly return to a subject in an effort to make a picture very deliberate even whilst conveying movement. I will take her advice back to the drawing board, not because the works made are deficient, but to continue the quest.

Three Ceramic Reliefs

White Window and Woods, approx. 3" x 3"

Clouds in a Black Square, approx. 3" x 3"

Central Park from the 21st flr., approx. 4" x 5"

These pieces continue ideas explored in my painting, specifically landscape and window, the stage (buildings in Central Park flanking center like curtains, layers of trees then distant buildings center stage), and minimalist squares with a central focus in the cloud relief. The top image is of the test tiles I'm beginning to make, a new adventure. I think they have the peaceful quality in a lot of my landscapes, a richness in color, and pronounced texture, of course. They are three-dimensional paintings.

At the end of the eighth century the Greeks (of course) invented baked clay tiles for the functional purpose of waterproofing the ceilings of temples. The Metropolitan Museum of Art New York has a nice example. I love this Islamic one with an arabesque. This 16th century French platter done reflects the interest in science at the time with reliefs of snakes, frogs, and bugs. Both the unappetizing subjects and the raised forms make it unlikely dinnerware. It seems as though the artist enjoyed making this unconventional, imaginative object. I do like it better than this foo-fooy platter relief, also done in France, at the beginning of the 1600's depicting Pomona, the goddess of gardens and orchards. I think I just don't like women being treated as decorative objects, not so much that she is shown on a plate, but the way she might as well be anything else depicted. No special thought is put into showing her thoughts, personality, or expression. I'm all about expression.

Summer Lake Ontario

digital image (iphone)

Gone fishing.

No, flying to Chicago, be back soon.

Hope you get some summer sun too.

Summer #1

6" x 12"

oil on panel

Here is a summer one for you now that it is August. The trees are dense with leaves, bits of color and texture begging for dots. I like the undulation of the tree line, difficult to imagine convincingly without direct observation. Greens range from yellows to blues, light to dark, bright to subdued. Sometimes in winter the contrast seems closer and I miss hitting the different keys. The painting I do isn't isolated but comes out of a cultural context.

I've written a bit about the history of landscape painting in America. Painting the landscape was a matter of pride in the eighteen hundreds, a new territory for painters to conquer like the explorers. Europe has old monuments and a long history, but America has its land. It became a matter of pride, the Grand Canyon acts as our Coloseum. I came across an interesting snippet about President Roosevelt. He initiated conservation plans. Aware that resources will run out (even the Ancient Puebloans of Mesa Verde had that problem), he began initiatives resulting in the preservation of approximately 230,000,000 acres of American land in the form of National Parks and Forests and other preservations. He speaks to Congress:

"To the Senate and House of Representatives:

. . .The conservation of our natural resources and their proper use constitute the fundamental problem which underlies almost every other problem of our national life. . ..As a nation we not only enjoy a wonderful measure of present prosperity but if this prosperity is used aright it is an earnest of future success such as no other nation will have. The reward of foresight for this nation is great and easily foretold. But there must be the look ahead, there must be a realization of the fact that to waste, to destroy, our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed. .."

My little painting is a reminder of the beauty of the natural world and the personal revitalization it offers.

June Watercolors

watercolor on paper

5" x 4" and 4" x 5"

The summer is throwing a curve ball in my blogging so don't think that I don't know it's not June anymore. I like these three. The way an artist thinks about abstraction is evident from picture to picture. Reducing, "less is more", simplicity, it's all there but the basic impetus is to capture as much as possible in the fewest means possible. I guess I use the word "means" because its not as easy as it looks and the artist doesn't really know what to do and has to wing it. They are kind of haiku-ish. I start out with the feeling, "Okay, I want to show you everything" (although probably not as intensely as a photo-realist might). After that it is something like, "now that I've gotten all that off my chest, I can show you what else I see with my special x-ray reduction glasses". My son and I are currently listening to A Cricket in Times Square by George Sheldon, and it is like the symphony compared to a cricket and maybe the cricket is John Cage. He realized the importance of listening in relationship to sound and music. The process is like removing layers to reveal what is underneath. Seeing things anew, artists can take the smudges off your glasses (I won't try to take that analogy to sound and the ear).

I hope you enjoy my light, lyrical chirps.