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!!!

Across From Cobblestone

26" x 20"

oil on canvas

The color structure of this one is very ROYGBIV (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple = full spectrum - rainbow). Such a color scheme often can be too sweet, too child-like for my purposes, but the balance of colors and their tonality evade the trap. There is playfulness, however, as in many of my paintings. While painting the branches of the gray tree running in front of the pine I thought of an earlier blog comment about dots, resolution, and the appearance of Christmas tree lights while one's glasses are off. That is a relaxing, dream-like moment based in vision. The activity of making the dots is an indulgence in that kind of state of mind. It is a form of meditation. Although we all get busy, often out of necessity, I think there is some wisdom in a quote of Socrates: "Beware the barrenness of a busy life". It is easy to miss things if we can't stand still.

Back to the formal aspects of painting. Color Theory was one of the classes I taught while a professor of fine arts. Some exercises I gave to students were invented by painter, teacher, and color theorist Joseph Albers. He had his students find color swatches from magazines, which takes forever. Color Aid paper is standard now.

Our color perception is effected by the surroundings of a color, their context.The first exercise is called "3=4" The coral colored square on the right is the color that is going to change its appearance based on the ground it is on. Thus three colors: left ground, right, ground, and swatch will now equal four perceptually. It seems like magic. So those little strips hugging the edges of the rectangles are both the same color, this coralish thing. To do the exercise one needs to flip through a variety of colors on the left and the right in order to change the appearance of the swatch. Backgrounds can vary in intensity, saturation, tone, and hue. It is much more difficult if the swatch is cut larger than those strips and is not recommended for this exercise. As you can see, the strip on the left is lighter and more yellow than the one on the right. Students are first able to see the difference of light and dark and then the difference in hue. Subtle changes aren't perceived initially and there is often a bit of disbelief that the professor is seeing something that they can't.

3 = 4

The second exercise is similar. The search for grounds this time will be focused on making two different colors look the same. Two grounds plus two swatches = 4 then made to look like 3 total. The more different the colors are, the more difficult the exercise. In such cases the two may be brought closer together, but an exact replication may be all but impossible. The study below has a bright middle-of-the-road green and a lighter, muted yellow-green. Differences in the exercise are fairly perceptible, but they look much more like the same color than when they are isolated.








4 = 3

This theory gets put into practice in my work as a dot of a particular hue in one area of a painting looks different when placed somewhere else. A harmony is created as the colors seem to relate, to have something in common that makes them easy on the eye.

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.

March

36" x 42"

oil on canvas

March is windy! The dots are blowing, springing out into space; invisible vectors seem to pull the eye back in. The center strip of landscape substitutes for a vertical person, the white the outside world. The dots' flow is symbolic of a personal connection with the life. Like an individual, the landscape is rich, layered, complete within itself as it sends out positive energy and receives it in turn. The circle is known to be a symbol of the self. As such, the dots can additionally be seen as a collection of individuals also radiating their uniqueness and place in the universe. [Do I sound New Age-y or what?] It is a picture of harmony but also fluctuation and change. We don't always know which way the wind will blow. Lyrics from one of my favorite songs, U2's Kite, "Who's to say where the wind will take you Who's to say what it is will break you I don't know Where the wind will blow".

A reoccurring theme is still there: a window looking out into the landscape. Pinpoints of the view appear through sheer curtains. As far as curtains go, I thought of those white ones with stitches forming tiny dots.

There is a good article describing the symbolism of the circle by two mathematicians: Reza Sarhangi and Bruce D. Martin.

A landscape I responded to as a kid that I think relates to this painting is the poppy scene in The Wizard of Oz. The plentiful poppies cause the journeying characters to become hallucinogenic. The sudden snow shower pinches them awake and they continue, not knowing if their destination will fulfill their longing. The grass, a neutral light ochre with variation, is newly uncovered from snow. The painting is the moment of awakening. There is more certainty in my painting than the movie scene, but I think the color and movement of the dots dazzle, kaleidoscopic, like the bright red of an expansive poppy field. In high school I painted a copy of Monet's Poppy Field in a Hollow Near Giverny at the request of a friend. I had forgotten until now.

Winter Landscape #10 (My Backyard)

This photo of the woods in my yard is to show an example of what I'm looking at; I'm not painting from the photograph. I took the photo on a different day than I did the painting, but the two share similarities in color, air, and format.

oil on panel

24" x 18"

Colors jump out at me, dots bringing them to the front. When looking at nature, one often sees colors that stand out as well as many neutrals too plentiful to name. The dots isolate some of these colors, like a sample of the painter’s palette, perhaps like the theme of a musical composition. [The ring of hand bells, singular and brief, are part of a song just as the dots are to the painting. Check out Sonos Handbell Ensemble in this music sample of the Hallelujah Chorus by Handel.] Color theory is in play with a range of tints (white added to a color) creating unity and subtle contrast. The pale rose tone of the woods functions as a red contrasting with the high-key green, its complement

I think some of my landscapes are in similar to Claude Monet but with a twist. When first learning about Impressionism, many people marvel at the way a Monet landscape looks like the subject matter but on closer inspection the same picture reveals evidence of its making. Pieces of paint stand on their own. The artist’s thought and hand is in its construction is laid before us, unlike the classical painting tradition in which there were steps to making a painting that are invisible in the final layer (grisaille, then color; broader brushes to small, soft ones which even things out; varnish for a glossy surface, example: Claude Lorraine, Landschaft mit Apollo und Merkur, 1645). Sometimes the circles function like the brushstrokes of a Monet: the landscape is seen as a whole at a distance and some circles are visible, but not as well until observed close up. Others are composed of such large dots/circles that their geometry is up front, announcing straight off that they are not about realism, such as Winter Landscape #8 (Blue Dots) in a previous post. In other paintings I paint the whole picture in dots while at other times I only place a few or none at all. A note relating to a comment on that painting: the term "pixel" is short for picture element (thank you Webopedia.com). Despite these nineteenth and twentieth century painterly sources I believe pixels also feed into my work. Pixels have changed the way we think about images: what they are made of or the way they can be reduced to a basic structure. Discontent with the mechanical aspect of pixelization, my work brings the human touch to this design element.

Painter, critic, and former Professor at Yale University, Andrew Forge is an inspiration. In the back of my mind I think of him, as he focused on paintings made of dots about nature and other subjects. He co-wrote a book on Monet with Robert Gordon. His friend, poet John Hollander wrote a poem "Effet de Neige" about Monet's painting La Route de la ferme Saint-Siméon dedicating it to Andrew Forge (in The Gazer's Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art). It is very moving speaks to the mystery in the space of landscape, life, and painting.

Winter Landscape #9 (Fog) and Homage to 19th Century Painters

24" x 18"

oil on panel

8" x 10"

oil on canvas

These paintings comment on nineteenth century landscape painting like the Hudson River School. Painters like Thomas Cole and Asher B. Durand set out to depict the American landscape as new territory, untouched, close to God, and unique. Their outlook was optimistic, like Obama's vision for America in the face of crisis es including environmental.

Dark trees often contrast with luminous sky in these works. Foliage is very textural and heavy while the skies are smooth and light. The second painting is a smaller jpeg of the third to show the naturalistic illusion of the painting which can't be seen except by stepping back. Close up the texture reads that this is painting and illusion is secondary. A band of black defines the right edge while the left is allowed to be atmospheric, a tension that makes the eye scan back and forth.

Charles Darwin was active at about the time as the Hudson River School. The subject of Darwin, art and evolution was the focus of a recent Brian Lehrer Show. The book: The Art Instinct – Beauty, Pleasure and Human Evolution by Denis Dutton , editor of http://artsandlettersdaily.com was the impetus for the discussion and Dutton was the guest. The book's premise is that evolution, not culture, determine’s taste through natural selection. It is a Darwinian take on aesthetics. Dutton thinks that our early ancestors were imprinted with certain landscape views in their travels and that is what makes us respond to such views in art. It takes Joseph Cambell's ideas on art and Jung's collective unconscious further by connecting it with evolution. As a painter I find this fascinating but I don't plan on making any art deliberately tailored to exemplify it.

The Yale Center for British Art is featuring an exhibit on Darwin's influence on the visual arts titled "Endless Forms': Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts" which closes May 3, 2009.