Trees and Green, Winter Landscape #11 Blue-Gray White

18" x 24" each
oil on panel


This week snow fell yet again in Rochester. There were many whining voices on Facebook. At first charmed in November by the snow scenes in Calvin and Hobbes, the effect wore off my son as he out the window before school remarking, "Curse snow." So I thought I'd pair this winter landscape with a spring one as we skirt the border between the two.


My husband described Trees and Green as being "fairy" as in the land of. I think there is something lush and unreal about it, although I thought of the image after going past a pair of tree trunks and seeing the grass in between. It was green for a few days! Space is created by the transition of green to yellow-green and the tactile quality of the foreground gradually moving toward a smoother top. The green almost seems hot in comparison with the cool tranquility of the winter landscape. The trees of the latter delicately reach into the winter air, less assertive that the trees in the former.


I enjoy the concentration and exactitude of the process of making the dot paintings but I also enjoy painting these expansive, fluid, more immediate pieces. In both cases, as in all my painting, paint is used as light. While on a visit to the MFA Boston during art school, artist Marcia LLoyd asked us in advance to select a piece or two from the collection that we connect with. I chose an enamel bracelet from the Indian Corridor. She saw that I was attracted to the luminous color (like my love of stained glass) and explained that there is a piece of metal inside the bracelet and light passes through the enamel, bouncing off the metal and returning to our eyes. This is the same way paintings often operate in which light passes through the paint to the white ground and back.

The nineteenth century landscape painter Boudin often made small paintings of the ocean with tiny figures in the dress of the times setting the scale and standing on the shore. They are vivid like how one sees in full sun. A quote of his seems to refer to this vibrancy, "To steep oneself in the sky. To capture the tenderness of the clouds. To let the cloud masses float in the background, far off in the gray mist, and then make the blue blaze forth." I am looking forward to dazzling spring and summer light.

Winter Landscape #8 (Blue Dots)

oil on canvas

52" x 30"
PRIVATE COLLECTION

I often see or think of things that make me smile. The dots will hopefully have that effect on you, especially while looking at the originals, where they might come into view unexpectedly. The dots sometimes seem surprising as you scan the surface. During a grad school crit, Nigel Rolfe remarked of my paintings, “the color wants to reward you.” This quality persists.

A comment (thanks, Rob) about the blurry but beautiful effect of seeing Christmas lights without glasses (for nearsightedness) is not off the mark. Christmas comes at the darkest time of the year and the lights we decorate with are attempts to restore some of the absent daylight. The light and color in my paintings also aim to lift spirits. The combinations of colors often make me smile as do a flock of birds turning in the wind, a patch of sun, pink toenail polish, and a dog whisker found while sweeping. This list is parallel to Rodger and Hammerstein’s My Favorite Things from The Sound of Music. Meant also to cheer one’s self, it funny that some of the lyrics include wild geese, the moon/sun, and kitten whiskers, not unlike my own favorite things. John Coltrane’s version (available to sample in I-Tunes) embodies the philosophy. In that way my paintings celebrate the silver lining.

On a similar note, in a The New York Times article Bruno Shultz, a Polish-Jewish artist killed in the Holocaust is heralded for creating paintings that help one "get through the long winter."