A few words about landscapes.
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Canadian Stream This landscape was painted entirely in glazes of transparent colors. This is another one where the scan doesn't do it justice. The picture has a nice depth of color, and the sky seems bright and crisp. This is a natural consequence of the glazing technique, since it depends on the way the light travels through the thin paint layer, reflects off the white ground and then passes through the layers of color a second time. It's just like how light passes through the body of a ruby and doesn't just bounce off the surface of the gem. Accordingly, I call this painting my little jewel.
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Joey's Balloon Ride This painting was done for my oldest son when he was four years old, in 1988. The nursery was decorated in a hot air balloon theme, based on a card he received from his grandmother when he was born. The view is of one balloon as seen from an observer in another balloon, so the viewer doesn't feel insubstantial or unsupported. The basket's rope cutting the diagonal across the picture plane is an important compositional element, and removes the feeling of loneliness that sometimes occurs in images of single, isolated balloons. In our basket can be seen the entire family; Joe grips the basket rail tightly, arms outstretched, holding back from the edge of the basket, excited but still apprehensive. His twin sister Heather is leaning over the edge trying to catch the birds (and she would too, no matter how many times admonished not to), my ex-wife and myself, with the long hair I wore at the time. I'm holding David in my arms, who was just one year old at the time. The landscape is pure fantasy. Although there is a hot air balloon launching site close to my current home, and balloons are a common site in the skies here, I've yet to see one with the rainbow arch design like I painted here.
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Bird In Paradise This picture was done as part of a workshop with Bet Borgeson in 1996, after I had already done a few colored pencil drawings on my own. As a classroom exercise, Bet placed a flower in a glass of water as a model. This type of flower provides plenty of opportunities for learning colorist techniques, and it's structural simplicity compared to a flower with heavily nested petals. Color mixing with pencils is unique, since normal color blending is not an option. Rather, a pointillist technique using the juxtaposition of small, discrete color dabs is used. Broad expanses of flat color look dull and dead, but colored pencils are ideal for preventing this. As the pencil is applied, the texture of the paper holds pigments at the high points on the paper, leaving the valleys still white. With a very sharp pencil of a different color, these valleys are filled in. And color voids which occur in those valleys is filled in with an ever sharper pencil of yet another color. The method is labor intensive, but the result is a lively, vibrant area with surprising color saturation. In this painting, the landscape, windsurfers, and distant schooner are pure fantasy, invented on the spot.
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Admiral of the
Emerald Isle This painting tells a story. The verdant scene is of the corner of a potato farm on the coast of Ireland, where the soil is difficult and outcroppings of rocks are common. The area is poor; the family's small house is plastered stone with a sod roof. Still, the people take pride in their lives, and the house is decorated around the perimeter with planted flowers. The mother to the right of the house is carrying out laundry to be dried, followed by the family dog who bounds behind her. The father is off in the distance by the left edge of the picture, in a skiff on the bay, fishing and hunting for clams while being harried by gulls. The storage shed to the left of center is in poor repair, as is the rock wall, which has collapsed where it was undercut by a stream. Rock walls are everywhere, built more to just get the rocks away from the plow than to mark any borders. In the stream plays the family's only child. He is shirtless and barefoot, and his jeans are torn and tattered. He plays with a small boat he made from a block of wood and a rag sail, prodding it along in the windless afternoon with the stalk of a reed. He is bored and restless, and dreams of the adventurous life of a sailor. When he grows, he will leave the farm behind, and rise over the years in the Navy to the rank of Admiral. By then, long after his parents have died, having reached his goals, he will look back to those peaceful days of his youth, and know too late that those were the only times of his life when he was truly happy.
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Volcanic Landscape This is a fantasy landscape, unfinished. The scene is of the cinder cone of an extinct volcano, where lava extrusions have formed strange shapes, thrusting upwards at some times and flowing plastically at others. Different concentrations of minerals and gas pockets brought to the surface have left voids which then solidify into numerous caverns. Water erodes the fragile ground into streams and small lakes. Weather quickly changes the color and texture of the ground into a variety of fantastic niches. I especially like the distant hills in the center of the picture, and wondering what might have inhabited the various caverns.
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The Greek Church One of my first paintings, done when I was thirteen or fourteen, and is the earliest work I have any record of. It's not a very good painting from an artistic perspective, and gives a somewhat surrealistic feeling which I can't recall if it was intentional or not. The structure of space is unclear, the dimensionality of the various planes and forms is confused, and the contrast is too exaggerated. The ground is overly simplified and featureless. After the painting was finished, I applied a layer of copal varnish that was much too thick, and this varnish dried somewhat unevenly, which is especially noticeable over the lighter areas of the building and sky. But this was an important painting in my development as an artist, and it's not without a certain rough charm, so I've included it here in any case. |
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