Spring Landscapes #22, #23, #24 Farms & Windmill

Spring Landscape #22 Windmill, 24" x 18", oil on panel

Spring Landscape #23 Farm, 18" x 24", oil on panel

Spring Landscape #24 Land, Cloud, Trees, 18" x 24" oil on panel

The top three images are done on an iPad with the Brushes application. I consider them art but also wanted to do the ideas in oil, which is different. The color in Spring Landscape #24 Land, Cloud, Trees isn't right but it was the best I could capture and rework in iphoto; don't know why. The bottom half should be more luminous and the top half less bright. The iPad pictures translate perfectly, as is the nature of the beast, in this case the screen. The iPad pics were done in the car while passing these views. Sketchbooks are getting very sophisticated. I find the digital images are subtly changing my painting sensibility. The iPad work is less dense, not being bound to a material form in the same way as a painting. It's color and light differs from the observable world and as well as the painted one. Some people may prefer it. I don't but I confess that I like it just as much. [audible gasp from a good percentage of painters] I feel the need to say over and over that there is nothing like painting but I really LIKE this. Maybe because it is also painting just as making marks in the sand with a stick is drawing; no artist would argue that it isn't. Look at how artist Andy Goldsworthy draws. [Looking at his stick sculpture on site with a circular opening framing the landscape I think that maybe he's better at doing what I'm trying to express. Maybe we're just on the same wavelength and he has his methods and I have mine. See similarities in last week's post.] If drawing can happen with any material then digital drawing shouldn't be inferior. The material doesn't make for greatness, however, as a stick of charcoal makes drawings in a wide range of quality depending on the person holding it.

Onto a discussion about the work. It is too much for me to talk about all three images because I need to spend more time in the studio than on this blog. I enjoy the scale and pattern and exuberance in these. I'd like to focus on Spring Landscape #22 Windmill. The hill looks like the earth/globe. The painting is a positive picture of renewable energy. The depiction shows wind energy is far-reaching, energizing the atmosphere as well as the surrounding air. A thin cloud acts as an extension of on of the windmill's blades. Space is arching. The analogous color scheme of blue/green/yellow and flowing lines help to create a feeling of harmony. Windmills aren't a source of harmonic discussion, however. A wind farm proposal for perhaps what would be the largest in the world, is on the table for Cape Cod, close to where I live in Rhode Island. The controversy involves the trade offs for clean, renewable energy including concerns for wildlife, marine life, land rights, decreased property values, and of particular interest to me, aesthetics. I LOVE how these turbines look. They are sleek and elegant like Brancusi's polished brass Bird in Space. Van Gogh loved windmills as did Rembrandt before him. They not only accepted this "modern" addition to the landscape but found poetry in its structure. Maybe people see them as vertical obstructions in a horizontal ocean view or a sign of contemporary life encroaching on nature. Nature is at stake and while I'm not qualified to lecture on the negative effects of windmills to the immediate surrounding area vs. their benefit to our environment globally, (a great site for this is the American Wind Energy Association) I have looked at both sides of the argument and firmly believe they are for the greater good. If you are on the fence and the main issue for you is aesthetics, this art chick says to get over it.

Looking Up

12" x 12" oil on panel

Oil paint! There's nothing like it. I couldn't have more pleasure eating an ice cream sundae. Amidst all the boxes from our January third move to Rhode Island I stole a small amount of time to break in my new studio. It is very modest, a third bedroom, compared to my former dream studio, but the press and flat files fit in the basement and we'll be setting up a small shed for the kiln.

Pressed for time, I made a picture as if I could only paint one dot and had to get everything I wanted to say into it, distilled like a haiku. The picture relates to other "minimalist" works I've done as well as a painting I did in 2005 called The Veil. The image came to me while watching Shaun the Sheep Off the Baa with my son. No kidding, the claymation cartoon by Aardman Animations. It is set on a farm so the setting is pastoral. There was a shot of Shaun looking up from a pit or something; I don't quite recall the scenario. My husband thought of artist Andy Goldsworthy (he makes art out of nature while in nature, stunning, check him out) when he saw it. Funny, I looked at the cover of my book of his work in passing as I unpacked it, finding it too large to fit on my bookshelf. It is perhaps an unconscious influence but there is definitely a relationship.

The view is from underground looking up at the sky. There's a little Alice in Wonderland to it, a surreal journey from one place to another that is unknown. It is definitely about my move. You can never quite know exactly what it will be like until you get there. The brown vortex suggests climbing through an earthy, murky tunnel with eyes set on getting out. The central focus is air, breathe-ability. My family has been looking forward to much shorter work hours for my husband, friends in the neighborhood for my son, and an art community for me. The goal is more breathe-ability and already we've experienced a significant difference. For the first time in our eighteen-year relationship my husband has been home for breakfast and dinner every day. My son has plans to see three friends outside of school this week, and I've had a close artist friend from college over and will be getting together with three others shortly.

Back to the painting, the lighter and warmer brown towards the cooler brown/black surrounding the center is a transitional space. It isn't static but propellant. It also isn't negative like solid, flat black but like fertile soil, implying growth through change. It isn't a smooth transition, however, and one could imagine it being a bit slippery, something one has to slug oneself through in order to make it, similar to climbing a rope but messier. The view is also telescopic, the blue circle like a planet, a new world for which there is little detail, little information except something placid, pleasant, promising. I think everyone needs to carve out a space in their days, their lives to have such a place.