Pastel Landscape #3 and #4

24" x 18"

oil pastel on paper

A red maple is bracketed by two slanting birches made of gray paper and white highlights. The dynamic, spontaneous brushwork of my large Abstract Expressionist paintings done ten years ago find new life in a different medium, scale, and subject. Working in the former manner gave me an awareness of the picture independent of the subject, the thing the viewer is going to see. Vigor can be deadened when the artist becomes enslaved by the subject, feeling a sense of loyalty to do it justice. The artist's feet become stuck in cement. Abstract painting can be lifeless too, shapes without soul. It doesn't have to do with how "finished", refined, or detailed a picture is; it is the vitality and passion, quiet or loud, that makes a picture go.

Chardin (1699-1779) a representational painter with a tender eye, quiet and sensitive to seeing, known especially for still life and scenes of daily life. Pollock literally poured his angst and energy into his pictures, qualities missing from wanna-be's. He was very focused, something that escapes people who dismiss the splatters as out of control. It is always sad to me when art is misunderstood. Maybe that is why I write about mine.

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.

The White House and House with Black Roof

oil on panel

36" x 24"
PRIVATE COLLECTION

ceramic relief

6" x 4 1/2"

The ceramic relief was done after the painting. Circles are made by pressing the end of a tool into the clay; some look convex but they are all concave. They define planes but also float.

There are trails leading your eye around, dictating a specific speed, tempo, like most painters do. The book Cezanne's Composition maps the directions Cezanne takes the viewer, like arrows painted on the floor for learning dance steps. Cezanne is often somber, intense and a lower key than Van Gogh. The Plain White T's have a song I like similar to this mood, Write You a Song. "I will write you a song; that's how you know our love is still strong." I've said it before - I'm a romantic.

In my mind my painting and relief aren't just depictions of houses but are about making a home with someone. Crosby Stills and Nash's Our House and Billy Joel's You're My Home does it for me as does the new kids movie Up. The part of the story that takes Up beyond the pat endings of many animations is the relationship of the elderly man and his wife. He has a loyalty to his house because of his memories of her together with him in it. He has a very hard time letting go, to say the least. A house is a house. A home is the love inside. Pass the tissues.

For Christoph who wrote "I love Nicole" in sharpie on my arm.

Lake Ontario

15" x 18"

oil on canvas

Here is Lake Ontario, twenty minutes from my house outside of Rochester. Bracketed by black edges, it reminds me of a Kodak (Rochester's own) slide, now obsolete. The suggestion is a section of a larger whole. It is easy to get lost in Lake Ontario, at least visually. It is large enough to seem like an ocean, although a placid one. Stripes go beyond graphic flatness to simultaneously convey density and luminosity.

The graphic underpinnings of the picture remind me of the Op-Art Movement I learned about in art school. Op-Art focused on optical phenomena inspired by nature. Viewers are made aware of the process of looking, the way the eye functions. Op-Artist Bridget Riley's stripe paintings concern themselves with bands of color, placement, width, and the creation of light. They differ from my work in that my paintings have more organic qualities, changing texture, and a more overt reference to nature (Riley was also influenced by landscape), and sense of weight. Painter Ross Bleckner knew Riley. I like his work very much. He paints fields of compartmentalized organic forms. Newer circle paintings related to bubbles, the natural world, and Christmas ornaments (like some of my paintings, funny). He plays with the focus of forms as if adjusting a lens or microscope.

In reflecting on what makes my painting different from the actual lake as well as these aforementioned painters, is it is a bit anthropomorphous. All painting transmits the thoughts and feelings (or lack thereof) of the painter rather than just the subject. Lake Ontario feels sure of itself and its identity, both bold and fluid.

Spring #12 Green Violet Grid and Red Window Sill

oil on canvas

Number twelve is a square divided by six.  Two trees make a diagonal; the center two colors are lighter than the rest.  There are subtle textures between the sections.

Some people prefer directly observed landscapes/pictures compared to invented and vice versa, but both are informed by everything I see and have seen.

The Red Window Sill makes me thing of the game Mastermind which I recently played with my son now that summer vacation is in full swing.  The black, white, blue, green, red in the painting are like a row of the colored pieces but are specific hues rather than generic unmixed primaries.  Both paintings have this quality.

American painter Ellsworth Kelly is known for his color sensibility. At first I had a difficult time appreciating his shaped canvases painted with only one color.  Now I see the elegant beauty of his decisions.  He is represented by the Matthew Marks Gallery which is a large enough space to show his large paintings, 80" x 77" for example.  In Painting for a White Wall Kelly tries to further control the viewing experience of his piece by strongly advising the background for his work by including it in the title.  A different colored wall would completely alter the color situation he has established.

  Contemporary curators experiment with wall colors.  Several years back the MFA Boston showed Sargent's The Daughters of Edward D. Boit on a maroon wall.  Red being the complement of green, the green-blacks in the painting came out.  How Sargent may feel about this is questionable, but it did achieve a fresh view of the picture long on view in the permanent collection.  Electric lights, print media, television and computers completely changed the way artists perceive color. In addition, images can be tweaked photo editing software with the slide of a bar.  It is very different than a painter deliberately choosing the light, color, and focus for a painting.  These issues for colorists are my own and my thoughts on them pervade everything I do including playing ancient board games.

Ceramics!

Hill, Dark Trees

Winter to Spring Window

Tilting Field

all approximately 5" x 7"

The kiln works!!!!!!  I got a used kiln and a dream come true in one.  I mainly want to make landscape reliefs. I don't know if I'll make vessels, maybe hand-built incorporating relief.  These can be hung on the wall by an indentation in the back.  I love that these landscapes are made from earth, clay.  The layers of the land, its undulations; the space between expanses of field, woods, hill, and sky are the subject.  Here in the country these areas, their textures, color and expanse fill my eyeballs.  We are fortunate to have the undeveloped lot across the street and we don't feel hemmed in.   I love moving the clay, forming vision into something I can handle, like building with hammers, nails, and wood.  In addition to form there is the stretching of the ground and the sky that is over and around.   Making this experience into a solid is challenging and fascinating.  

Greek bas reliefs are narratives telling history and myth pulled out of marble with the perfection of structure embodied in that culture's architecture.  I admire them greatly, but am not interested in pursuing their figuration and Platonic purity of the ideal.  My things are crude, reflective of the mud they are made from and the mud they represent.  Beautiful in the organic qualities like the range of compost to thriving plants.  They have the cultural context of a Bostonian relocating and embracing the middle of nowhere.  Local doesn't have to mean provincial.   I am just beginning.

Spring #11 May Field

oil on panel

6" x 12"

  "I can do whatever I want any old time."

  Post-modernism is a distrust of established canons in art but not limited to art.  It re-evaluates all western values.  The effects of this movement caused a paradigm shift prompting discord with conservatives here and abroad from right-wing Christians to the Taliban.  Examples of artistic deconstruction of traditional artistic practice are the Dada Movement (Duchamp), Fluxus, and Performance Art to name a few.  One act which shocked and then delighted me is when in 1952 Willem DeKooning erased a Robert Rauschenberg drawing.  It seemed like vandalism rebelling against a statement, negating it, pushing a fellow artist off the top of a mound like an alpha male. It was a collaboration, Rauschenberg approached DeKooning who didn't like the idea, reconsidered, and then said he wanted it to be "something he would miss."  It is an example of letting things go.  In drawing one can erase as much as draw, and additive and subtractive method as in sculpture, so this action still has its roots in traditional art.  DeKooning picked a picture with oil paint in it so it took Rauschenberg a month to erase it.  The work elicited a scandal. This interview with Rauschenberg about the event is very interesting.

  My work is fairly traditional as all painting tends to be seen now.  I vacillate in my approach as I don't feel the need to adhere to any rigid definition and can paint as I please.  While I have responsibilities like everyone else, artistically I feel as the Rolling Stones say in I'm Free, "I'm free to do what I want any old time."  It's something one wants to shut.  Even if one's song (one's creative output, oneself) is imperfect, out of time, there is value in it.  Written in the sixties, the song's reference to love reflects the need for acceptance despite social rebellion, the desire to be loved as is.

  On one of his visits to Penn, painter/teacher/critic Andrew Forge asked all of us young painters if we could think of a painter who Pollock [a fun Pollock inspired website lets you move your curser to make Pollock drip patterns] makes us see in a new way.  Also what particular qualities do we see anew?  The questions show how contemporary life can inform how we view history just as history reaches out into the present.  It is impossible to be extricated from one's time.  I said that Pollock changes how we see Vuillard in terms of passion and movement in paint handling as well as pattern.

  Despite artistic freedom, our time leaves its mark.  It is said that Americans have such a rich range of experiences and viewpoints but when an American is in a different country, say a Texan and a Connecticut Yankee, they are unified and easily identified by some quality that is strictly American.  My work shares this phenomenon.  It is American but its hard to say why.  Maybe its the aspect of freedom and the particular places I paint.  While having parameters, a set of "givens" (elements of design, a surface to paint on, etc.) there is choice.  "I'm free to do what I want..."

Spring #10 April Hudson River

oil on canvas

54" x 42"
PRIVATE COLLECTION

I'm a little freaked out to tell you the truth.  I'm a little worried now that I've seen Art Weekly on a couple different monitors that some of you are seeing these overexposed.  The tablet laptop I started this on had a screen that could tilt, thus altering the brightness of the image with its angle.  Now I'm on an HP monitor for a Mac Mini and it doesn't tilt.  I cringe when I see the pictures on the blog so bright, but I don't want to change things now because you all have different computers out there and I think I just have to deal.  Alright, let's move on.

Spring #10 April Hudson River  is done from a colored pencil sketch I did on an Amtrak train from Rochester to Penn Station NYC.  The day was hazy and the colors in between the color-suck of winter and the fireworks of spring.  I think I made my own fireworks with the vibrancy of the tree line and the blue circles of water (can't quite call them droplets) coming at the viewer.  The painting makes use of linear and atmospheric perspective.  Dark gray/black dots seem connected like beads on a string or buoys.  The water had that range of silver, dark and light blues that went to purple, and white sparkles.  The hazy dots at the top gently fall down, shimmering, obscuring the hilltop.  You know, I don't think the Hudson River was quite this active, maybe it's me.

For more information on the Hudson River Valley, check out:

http://www.scenichudson.org

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudson_River

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/hurs/hd_hurs.htm

Aerial View in Google Maps

Spring #9 (So Many Greens)

18" x 24"

oil on panel

As I paint dots I'm looking at other dots in paintings as well as references to circles in all the arts.  Aboriginal paintings from Australia are typically constructed of dots.  Some are done on bark. The bark connotes such a strong connection with nature that it is the substance of the image. Rather than depicting their surroundings in a literal way, the subjects are abstracted but often show nature via animals, fish, people, etc.  I found a source for their symbols.  The Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection at the University of Virginia has the largest collection of indigenous Australian art outside of Australia. 

Spring #9 (So Many Greens) draws heavily on visual perception done from direct observation, thus differing from Aboriginal art.  The commonalities are rhythm, nature, immersion in a particular place and way of life, and the abstract element of the dot as a vehicle for these things.  The greens can be spliced and spliced towards yellow, blue, violet, light and dark, etc.  Even the most representational painters have to simplify.  My family often looks out on such scenes from our dining room window as we eat meals together.  My son says that the greens are actually overwhelming from the window view but not when one is outside.  It is funny but it is like being overstimulated by flashing lights in a big city.  The painting is perhaps a bit less hyperactive due to its abstraction/simplification, my processing.  Some dots are more subtle than others like the ones in the sky.  I'm looking forward to looking at it through the winter.

Spring 5 (Cabbage Field), Spring 7 (First Green), & Spring 8 (Through the Shower Door)

8"x 10"
6" x 12"

oil on panel

Maybe it is spring moving onto summer where you are, but I'm freezing my butt off with my fellow Rochesterians. It's been in the 50's and 60's lately which would have been thrilling in February but is now getting old. I stumbled upon the poem Early Spring by Rainer Maria Rilke (www.poemhunter.com is a really great site for poetry). It is about the moment when the harshness of winter and its grey are replaced by "country lanes are showing these unexpected subtle risings that find expression in the empty trees". This is the moment and subject I'm painting.

Rilke (German) falls into the category of Romanticism (1800-mid c.) which emphasized imagination and emotion as well as originality of the artist, a reaction to the reason and order of the Enlightenment after the French Revolution. Even though structure can be found in nature it was still seen as an alternative to order in its wildness (great article by Kathryn Calley Galitz, Department of 19th c. Modern and Contemporary Art at the Met). Art wasn't simply a mirror of nature anymore but also related to one's inner self. I haven't read anything reaching the conclusion that this wildness expressed the inner self, but would venture that it would after the perhaps restricting Enlightenment. Examples of Romanticism in America are the Hudson River School. Other European artists include Turner and Gericault and the poet Byron.

How did we get here after complaining that my butt is cold?! I think my painting comes out of Romanticism, although it was pejorative to be called "Romantic" in graduate school. I think that kind of romantic was the extreme, saccharine Hallmark. Painting a fluffy kitten might have been grounds for expulsion. I think my work is romantic in a similar way to the music of Andreas Sahar, which has emotion and originality as two of its many strengths. The song Take to the Sky references nature in a charged, uplifting way I can relate to. Perhaps the landscapes I paint are a tinge romanticised, but I prefer to think celebrated. Truth be told, a cabbage field looks beautiful but smells way worse than a farm full of manure.

Spring #8 was inspired by looking through my steamy glass shower door and then at the landscape through the bathroom window. My bathroom walls are turquoise and the lawn outside provided a field of spring green, a favorite of mine. The humidity provided watery distortion, effected the color, and made me think of Florida.

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.

Yellow Walls, Landscape

24" x 36"

oil on panel

A concern of painters and a downfall of students is the problem of white. Too much white mixed in colors can bleach out a picture, leaving the appearance pasty. It is difficult to keep the tints (white added to a color) clear and purposeful, not faded and dull. White can bring light into a picture or it can drain it. I made plenty of pasty student paintings. Then students often overcompensate by making paintings almost completely out of bright colors. This painting problem is a part of Yellow Walls, Landscape. The bright yellow interior contrasts with the very pale outside which is bathed in a cool light. If I made the blue and green darker or more saturated the effect would be lost. I think I pulled it off. The left yellow rectangle is slightly darker and greener than the right, adding a hint of dimension.

I have a feeling that sometimes people see the wavy lines in my pictures as an ineptitude, evidence of not being able to draw a straight line. Over and over people say they disposes this ability as concrete evidence of their lack of creativity. Drawing straight is something that can be learned like good handwriting and is not a reflection of an artistic mind. For the record, if my line is wobbly it is intentional. It is because I deliberately want to convey something organic or flexible, in this case something of a curtain, or if it is window moulding then it is there as a transition from the crisp yellow to the natural outside.

Ruth Miller is a painter whose work shows an excellent color sensibility. Her work is sophisticated in its relationships of color and its role in composition. Images are sensitively created embedding time in the paint. She is represented by the Lohin Geduld Gallery in New York city.

Painting as practiced by Ms. Miller is described well by art critic Peter Schjeldahl in an April 6th interview in The New Yorker Out Loud. The focus of the talk was the emotional power of painting in relation to the exhibit Master Pieces of European Painting from the Norton Simon Museum at the Frick Collection in New York City. He spoke for all painting in saying, "Paint is made of the same stuff as we are". He explained the importance of seeing art in person because paintings are made of paint while reproductions are made of ink (I will assert pixels as well). In reproductions we just get the image, what we want to see/believe. Seeing the original poses a more challenging experience. He emphasized the term "hand-made" which is often downplayed in the current trend of appropriation. Schjeldahl gives Spanish artist Francisco de Zurbaran's Still Life with Lemons, Oranges, and a Rose, 1633, as an example.
The exhibition will be open until May 10th, 2009. Go, go, go!!!