Landscapes?

Freshly Shoveled Driveway   oil   11 x 14

Landscapes are my least favorite subjects, I'm afraid.  While I look out at the fresh environment, I am certainly taken with its beauty, but have no need whatsoever to replicate.  Interior::exterior.  Interiors, taken figuratively, are what move me.  

The artists in my classes always list landscape as one of their subject choices, so I comply.  In order to capture my interest, there simply must be a very personal reason to spend the effort.  In this case, a 22"  snowfall gave me just cause.  There were no snowplows for hire.  Two painting problems resulted.  Both were so very exciting.  One involved the play of the warm light against the cools of the shadows, temperatures, and the sky.  Cool dominant playing with warm.  the second involved the interesting topography of the lay of the snow:  harder vertical snowbanks and softer ones.  Shadows that helped to explain all of that.  Yes, I  feel tied into this picture.

And....I feel very very tired.

Unattached - and less is more

Unattached watercolor 9.5 x 13.5 Like so many people I have read about, I have been enormously taken with the notion of minimalism during the pandemic. Oh....I was already there, but to a lesser degree. At our house, we have been gradually reducing the collections of a lifetime: too many clothing items, too many dishes and casseroles (but I might need it sometime), too many garden pots and way too many tchotchkes. My work has aligned itself with the evolution of my belongings. I need less. For most of my artistic career, I have struggled with the notion of too many objects in the picture plane....chairs painted in, then painted out: still life paintings first painted as I see them, then gradually reduced to a couple of important relationships; shadows, interesting as they may be, were almost always eliminated. I am noticing the minimalism, more than ever, in my work. For me, the objects in the work become an interplay of subject (the tomatoes) and the ground (background). I am thrilled when these two notions interact in a series of rhythms. For the first time ever, I saw the reduction of my personal aesthetic needs reflected in this work. I was earlier satisfied. Done is done. But never say never....I have included a shadow in this one. Do I enjoy it? Not particularly.

I have tried to love shadows.....,

Garden Bench   mixed/paper   20.5 x 27

those areas of soft transparency where cools and warms play together and the reality of the moment is defined by the arc of the sun.  In fact, I love paintings by other artists where the story being told is about the shadows themselves, the objects that cast them being forced into supporting roles.  I also love back-lit paintings by other artists.  I just don't love doing them.  For me, the transparency has a place at the center of interest, in the story I am telling.  For me, opacity must play a counter-movement.  And so, "Garden Bench" started out as a pure watercolor.  It remained in my studio unresolved for a year or more.  I wanted an overall feel of chalkiness, of layer upon layer.  I relish the unexpected play of paint on the surface....the spattering, the marring, the dribbling.  Further work in gouache helped, but the resolution was still out of reach.  The work was satisfactorily completed in pastel.

"Garden Bench" is a mixed media work.  It simply had to be done.