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.