Spring Landscape #26, #27, & #28

Spring Landscape #26 Maple, 24"x18", oil on panel

Spring Landscape #27 Turquoise Picnic Table, 12" x 6", oil on panel*

Spring Landscape #28 Yellow, Green, Blue, 24"x18", oil on panel*

Landscape is an accessible subject, "pedestrian" as I said before. Critics chasing new media art might say it is "done to death". That leaves me an outsider to artists trying to dig up rules to break, which is ironically mainstream. What a pain in the neck. I like it all, as long as it's good. Neil Diamond's popular song, Sweet Caroline.

I sang it with the rest of the stadium at a recent Rhode Island Pawsox game. It seems to be a baseball favorite, thanks to production agent Amy Tobey who arranged for its play during the eighth inning at every Red Sox game at Fenway Park. Diamond performed it live (click to see) there April fourth, opening day. Inspired by Caroline Kennedy in 1969, it has nothing to do with baseball. Everyone knows the words, even the very young as sung by a boy in his car seat on America's Funniest Home Videos, the "buh, buh, buh" enthusiastically belted out. It reached number four on the Billboard Charts way back when, not number one and here it is ingrained in our culture in 2010. I shouldn't like it. I like alternative rock. I like classical music. I like jazz. I shouldn't like it but I do. I love it. Why? It's sentimental, romantic, nostalgic, descriptions to be shunned in art like the plague but I have a feeling that I shouldn't publicly admit that landscape painting draws people along the same lines. Diamond even sings about spring turning into summer, touch, emotions in the seasons. It's simple but it speaks to us. Lyrics:

"Was in the spring
And spring became the summer
Who'd have believed you'd come along

Hands, touchin hands
Reachin out
Touchin me
Touchin you

Sweet caroline
Good times never seemed so good"

I'm in a quagmire now, talking about my art and Neil Diamond in the same sentence. [Gawd, few painters get so many fans.] He has passion. My paintings aren't passionless. They're not geographical maps. They're not documentary photographs. They are trees, sky, and heart translated into paint. Buh, buh, buh.

*More on these paintings:

These are the last of the spring landscapes for the season as I move on to summer. They show two different approaches. The paintings have parallel intentions.

#26 defines areas of color: yellow-green grass, green trees, purple maple, gray and white sky. Those generalities are broken down or rather expanded within the areas and are simultaneously harmonized within the whole painting. The tree is symbolically like a human figure, strong and solid as the sky (larger world) keeps changing.

#27 is a tracking of space. There is a plotting, pinpointed by dots, in a line of sight that takes us up to the sky. The first thing to step over is the turquoise picnic table reduced to a triangle, painted thinly; the contrast in paint handling is unexpected. It is the cornerstone of the painting, weighted at the bottom. At the same time it is luminous and it seems as though one is turning a page of a book, one landscape picture peeling back to reveal some other image. I can't describe the something that happens in the painting between the layered dots, only that it takes a pedestrian subject to a deep experience. Don't dismiss it with a label, with a fleeting assessment, because there is more there. Everything I write about my work in this blog beseeches the viewer to look longer, to stretch the mind. This is in the work, this is the process of that work.

#28 is lighter. Ebullient, upper circles suggest leaves. They carry us along. The larger circles on the bottom are stamps (not literally), louder proclamations of the same idea. The tree divides the space, dark and denser than the red-brown stretch of paint that also means "tree" on the right. The blue and green have a playful dialogue. The yellow is in between, making for an analogous color scheme, a short-hand fitting the graphic nature of the picture. The temperature is cool with the blue and yellow both warmer than the green. The dark tree has purple and black tones to complement the lightened yellow dots. #28 is bold in its statement while #27 is strong as well but thoughtful and tender in a slower way.

Spring Landscape #25 Yellow Green Tree

Spring Landscape #25 Yellow Green Tree, oil on panel, 12" x 12"

Art and science overlap but it is a little hard for me to delve deeply since I'm only expert on one side. Here goes:

Aristotle, 340BC) The first Science (Metaphysics) is universal and is exclusively concerned with primary substance.

What I can say is basic: even air is made of matter, a primary substance. Landscape painting is all about objects in air; objects having more density than air. It's hard to do, perceiving anew, not just following a formulaic cliche. That is the difference between what I do, what I seek, and "pictures of landscape" which may also be in the medium of paint. It's what keeps me from being a craft fair vendor. Not everyone notices the difference and I don't want my work to be mistaken for something less.

Lines do not exist between things. Impressionists* (Monet, Seurat, etc.) eliminated the line. Post-Impressionists (Van Gogh, Cezanne, Gauguin) returned to the line in order to define form more clearly on the two-dimensional plane. Monet and Seurat were two of the only Impressionists, in my opinion, to really push the elimination of line in favor of marks/color in space. Degas and Cassatt never let go, asserting solidity, in love with form and the figure.

My dots are like cells, units, maybe enormous generalizations of atoms. They are also like the stitches in a tapestry. I'm fascinated by the interwoven air and form and their color interaction. It was a challenge to find a way to articulate the tree in Spring Landscape #25 Yellow Green Tree and make it simultaneously be independent of and integrated with the foliage behind it. Art has its own way of mirroring science. Monet was criticized, called "an eye" for his scientific like approach to analyzing colored light. He worked on a new canvas each hour on site, returning on another day with similar weather conditions in order to capture the changes. His work is emotional despite the structured approach. My work is also highly structured, a measurement to placement of dots and their careful articulation (yes they're freehand, as I'm often asked). In this painting the sky is rolling like waves and the dots bounce around the space like foliage ping-pong balls.

Art's purpose is distinct from science. Writer David Shields quotes Samuel Johnson, "A work of literature** should either help us escape existence or teach us how to endure it." Shields adds his own response, "And the works that I love the most teach us how to endure it. To me, a crucial idea is this: that we are existentially alone on the planet, I can't know what you're thinking and feeling and you can't know what I'm thinking and feeling. The very best work constructs a bridge across the abyss of human loneliness." Shields' new book, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, discusses literature's new role in connection to reality. Science and art, both investigating reality from different angles. Science is factual, art is involved with the perception of the factual which is it's own reality. Approaching a blank canvas is intimidating with this cooking in my brain. I'm off to take another stab at it.

*Wikipedia describes Impressionism: "Characteristics of Impressionist paintings include visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage of time), ordinary subject matter, the inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience, and unusual visual angles. The emergence of Impressionism in the visual arts was soon followed by analogous movements in other media which became known as Impressionist music and Impressionist literature."

**insert "art"

[For researching this post I went to Teachers' Domain, a website to help teachers use digital media in the classroom is great for explaining topics in science, art, social studies, language arts, and math to kids and adults who might have missed that day in school : ) ]

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.

Spring Landscapes #19, #20, #21

Spring Landscape #19 Sky 12" x 12", oil on canvas

Spring Landscape #20 Buds 12" x 12", oil on panel

Spring Landscape #21 Green and Pink Trees 12" x 12", oil on panel

On June 1st, 2010, The Guggenheim Museum of Art, New York City, will announce the winners of its competition, Contemplating The Void.

Competition Description:
To celebrate the close of the Guggenheim’s 50th Anniversary year, we invite you to create your own dream intervention of the Guggenheim Museum. Now you can take on the same challenge that 200 artists, designers, and architects took on for the exhibition Contemplating the Void: Interventions in the Guggenheim Museum.

Contestants were asked to:

"• Design your own intervention of the Guggenheim’s iconic rotunda.

• Your submission can be a hand sketch, a computer rendering, a watercolor, a painting, a photo collage—in other words, any 2-D format that helps communicate your ideas. "

These ideas were then uploaded to flickr, where they are still on view.

I saw in person the actual exhibit at the museum which was the spring board for the on-line contest. It was like seeing professionals doing an art school assignment,, creative people stretching their imaginations to solve the same problem uniquely. Some filled the center of the museum with trees, chocolate, a butterfly garden, gay pride stripes, laundry on a clothesline, glitter, and an inverted spiral. It epitomized the brainstorming necessary in any creative endeavor.

My creative endeavors this week include the use of the center spatially, though not in any way involving the Guggenheim or its architect, Frank Lloyd Wright. #19 and #21 are squares with circular compositions. #19 is about the sky filling the void, the space framed by a circlet of trees and leaves. The green dots get smaller towards the center, pulling you up, while the blue central dots are somewhere in between, ambiguously falling or rising. The sky is a solid but thinner. It holds promise.

#21 appears to people differently. My husband thinks it looks like a pink moon through the trees. My son says it is like looking up through a tunnel at the them, "Cool!". I made it by looking through my hand like it was a telescope at the trees across the street, one of which is a pink magnolia. Pink, a type of red, complements the green and is echoed by the red-brown, large dots in the foreground. The dots are like the tiles of a mosaic or the sections of glass in a rose window. The paint is velvety, something the those media are not. It is like a kaleidoscopic mandala, having motion while mandalas are still. Similar to a mandala, however, I think the image invites meditation, daydreaming and glazing over. A friend suggested they look like the images used to check color blindness. They do resemble them in their construction, their elements, but the paintings are obviously much more.

#20 is left out of this conversation. It sits vertically, angular, with dots rebelling, buoyantly asserting their individuality. I like that.

Spring Landscapes #16, #17, #18

Spring Landscape #16 April, 12" x 6" oil on panel

Spring Landscape #17 Magnolia Trees, 12" x 12" oil on panel

Spring Landscape #18 Three Clouds, 24" x 18", oil on panel

Did you know that the whopping majority of painters are insulted if you call their work "pretty"? You don't have to tell me that's what these are. It is a sort of trouble to me.

"Beautiful" is much more acceptable. The difference? The dictionary defines "pretty" as "attractive to the eye" and the noun, "pretties" refers to the ornamental. Even more so, painters HATE their work considered ornamental, decorative, the insinuation being that the work has little substance beyond looking good. It's the equivalent of a trophy wife. Beauty is also defined as being delightful to see, but under synonyms the dictionary says this:

A person or thing that is beautiful has perfection of form, color, etc., or noble and spiritual qualities: a beautiful landscape, a beautiful woman. Handsomeoften implies stateliness or pleasing proportion and symmetry: a handsome man. Pretty implies a moderate but noticeable beauty, esp. in that which is small or of minor importance: a pretty child.

Beauty refers to a "perfection of form", i.e. a Platonic ideal and something that may have spiritual qualities. This is much better. Pretty is diminutive "that which is small or of minor importance."

I know my recent work, especially these paintings, is pleasing to the eye but it falls more within "beautiful" as it strives to reflect the spiritual (interconnectedness of all things esp. through nature, the lift of happiness in a sunny day and in color). The harmony and balance achieved through design sense is a kind of ideal.

Even the sunniest day might bring physical discomfort regarding temperature, a bird could poop on you, or sand might blow in your eyes. The paintings are landscapes viewed from a little distance, like photographs of sentimental moments. There is a preciousness about them. Beauty is transitory; we attempt to retain our youthful appearance but the paintings freeze it. Ideals, they show a benchmark like a Best in Show beagle. The paintings aren't just superficial beauty (I'm sure you're getting this by now) but also are about an essence of truth, of meaning made tangible. But I want them to delight, dazzle. I want them to elevate mood, elevate hope, confirm good in life like someone saying "Good morning" in contrast to a car bombing. Small things matter, a piece of paint, a speck. A friend, a wife of a pastor, recently gave a guest sermon in which she spoke about the anonymous people involved in building a cathedral. She compared the labor, the small acts of individuals as metaphors for the unseen good we do daily to support one another. These paintings are for you in the trenches.

Spring #13,14, & 15

Spring Landscape #15 Lincoln Woods 24" x 18" oil on panel

Spring Landscape #14 Rainy March 27" x 21" oil on canvas

Spring Landscape #13 It Stopped Raining 12" x 12" oil on panel

"Avery is first a great poet. His is the poetry of sheer loveliness, of sheer beauty... This - alone - took great courage in a generation which felt that it could be heard only through clamor, force and a show of power..." - Rothko's eulogy for PAINTER Milton Avery, (appearing in Milton Avery The Late Paintings, by Robert Hobbs 1946, Abrams Inc.).

I can relate to Avery in the way he painted, as a colorist favoring landscape, and the difficulty of being engaged with natural beauty in a tumultuous and increasingly technological world. I see this tension in my new painting, Spring Landscape #15; the branches electrified and pointing to a focal point in one-point perspective. The struggle of art in contemporary life seems to be coming up more and more. In her book Finding Beauty in a Broken World, writer Terry Tempest Williams considers beauty and art and its place in the world. She places art in juxtaposition with the environmental crisis and the Rwandan genocide. She believes art is a way of survival, and so do I.

We've recently recuperated from flooding here in Rhode Island. I had to scramble to bring many of my large paintings up from the basement, packing my dining room and studio. I only got a half-inch of water, nothing like neighboring towns needing evacuation. Numbers thirteen and fourteen came out what seemed like an endless string of rainy days leading up to the flooding of parts of I-95 South. My backyard was squishy and the greens brilliant and mossy. The back story of these paintings involves joyfully finding my imitation Wellies from our recent move, composting in downpours, stir crazy dogs barking and missing walks, and the basement reaching the humidity level of 50%, the ideal for art. All this is real to me just as much as the health care debate and anything else in The New York Times. Like Avery, I am guilty of loving light, color, and loveliness and am not detached.