Winter Landscapes #15 (Smooth in Blue and White) and #17 (Hazy Sky and Snow)

12" x 12" oil on panel

Now that it's officially spring I have to get caught up on posting my winter paintings; these are the last this year.

Smooth in Blue and White reminds me a bit of Georgia O'Keefe and the paintings she did of adobe buildings in New Mexico with their soft, flowing, yet rectilinear forms. She is an example of an artist who painted both abstractly and representationally , like myself. She said, "I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for." Those "things" are why painters paint rather than choose a different medium. Arthur Dove, a contemporary (and another fave of mine) painted similar forms.

Hazy Sky and Snow has a sun smack in the middle and towards the top of my composition. The sky and land bisect the square. Light colors shimmer like winter light. The arrangement reminds me of the painter Adolph Gottlieb, famous for his abstract paintings often having the particular structure of a vertical format with a circle painted at the top half and a jagged shape on the bottom. The two forms set in opposition stimulate metaphors in the viewer. I especially love his Rolling, 1961, with its landscape format, nice and bold calligraphic black line at the bottom, and two large circles in colors I love together: red and blue. He makes use of the color of the canvas like Chinese landscape painters use the white of the paper, something I enjoy as well.

My spring series will continue shortly...

Winter Landscape #14 The Neighbor's House & #16 My New Neighborhood

both are 12"x12" oil on panel

When I think about these paintings I can make fun of myself, hearing Weird Al Yankovic's latest song, White and Nerdy (the resemblance to certain loved ones is hilarious) or the theme song to the kids movie Over the Hedge, Rockin' the Suburbs by Ben Folds.

I hesitated to post these. I'm living in the suburbs of Rhode Island, back to the suburbs (song) like where I grew up in Massachusetts, no longer the countryside in Western New York State. The subject is pedestrian; the suburbs are planned. I didn't want it to seem like the strange, artificial neighborhood in one of my favorite childhood books, A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine L'Engle. Everything is the same in that neighborhood and it's really creepy. Magritte's Empire of Lights is eerie with its blue sky and clouds but town in darkness.

I don't want the pictures to look like so many dead paintings done by amateurs. This kind of landscape is done to death like roses and it's hard to escape the cliches. I think I overcame them in my series of roses and I hope I did here. I'm happy with the way the trees came out and there is an overall joyous feel. People may see the familiar subject and feel comforted, something they can relate to, something pleasant. That's fine but it can also annoy me because they may miss the point just as much as they may find an abstraction illegible, undecipherable. Or the joie de vie will come across and the viewer will perceive the whole thing without additional knowledge like how I intuit a lot of classical music without being a musician. Appreciation can be just as deep because the art speaks to humanity not just the trained and educated.

I'm getting acquainted with my new home, orienting myself and using art as one way to do it. Many artists worked to capture the every day: Vuillard, Chardin, Vermeer, the photographer Nan Goldin and photography as a medium in general. The painter and art critic Fairfield Porter painted similar subjects to this and I love is work; it's so fresh. Who is to say that what superficially seems mundane can't be extraordinary? So much occurs within the routine. We study the every day lives of past cultures to find out what made them unique and how they are similar or dissimilar to us. And we always look at their art.

Maybe there are people in these houses who are hooked on the game Farmville on Facebook. There's a good chance because there are over eleven million daily users. This isn't a typo. The draw in pretending to be farmers may relate to the new trend of consciousness about where food comes from and the environmental and fiscal advantages of buying local. Maybe the the bucolic life is fantasy enough for suburbanites and city dwellers. I think the peaceful feeling I'm painting is like that. I don't play Farmville because painting is so fascinating but kudos to you if you do.

Winter Landscapes #12 and #13

Winter Landscape #12, Stone Wall Upper & Lower, 12" x 9" oil on panel

Winter Landscape #13, Dusk, 9" x 12" oil on panel

The movie Julie and Julia is every struggling creative person's fantasy. A true story, writer, Julie Powell, is frustrated and bored in her day job is inspired by another artist, Julia Child.

["Some people like to paint pictures, or do gardening, or build a boat in the basement. Other people get a tremendous pleasure out of the kitchen, because cooking is just as creative and imaginative an activity as drawing, or wood carving, or music." -Julia Child]

Combining her love of cooking and writing, she gives herself a monumental task with a deadline: to make every recipe in Julia Child's cookbook in 365 days, blogging about it on the way. It isn't easy, sometimes stressful, sometimes fun, but Julie succeeds in immersing herself in the process and gains literary attention (not to mention a major motion picture). I heard a writer on the radio tell about a strategy another writer recommended him: to write your life story in one hour a day at the same time for twelve days. Artists can find the structure and discipline such strategies can offer. Similar art school problems I heard from more than one teacher is to "make a hundred of them", "work on it for thirty-six hours", "draw the negative of it", or to paint on a deck of cards. The result would flush out problems in the work, probably resolve many, and provide focus. Painter On Kawara is known for his series of "date paintings" numbering over two thousand. Working in a series follows suit, like I am doing in my series of the seasons.

Winter Landscape #12, Stone Wall Upper and Lower, gets its title because my house has a beautiful stone wall around it. As a little girl, a thirty minute or so drive with my grandfather to visit my aunt in Ipswich, MA seemed like a long. Before the days of dsi's or even tapes of kids music, we had a lot of time on our hands. He came up with a game of counting all the stone walls and white fences we saw; simple, it delighted me. The center band of gray here has dots that don't really construct it but bubble up, pointing in perspective to the grass and sky above. The blue shadow has a different vanishing point off to the right. The painting is made of bands, the gray window edges, the upper left of which isn't fully covered with paint but dryly gone over allowing the white of the panel to show through and make light. The sky has blended bands of blue and of course there is the snow. It is called "Upper and Lower" because the wall is the middle line between the bottom and the top. The top could almost be spring and so in this way it is like an earlier painting of mine, Winter on the Left, Spring on the Right.

Winter Landscape #13, Dusk uses the white window edge to accentuate the blue of the snow, sky, and blue cast to the brown trees outside. It is quite stunning to look out and see that glow at the end of the day. I love to exclaim to my son, "Look, it's blue out!" trying to pass on that painter's knowledge that white isn't always white. Your assignment for the week, painter or not: look at the white walls of a room and see the color changes created by light. Notice warm vs. cool, bright vs. dark, blue/purple vs. yellow. If you get good you'll notice other colors, too. Take a break from texting and look : )