Storm in November, American River Parkway, Mixed media on canvas, Plein Air
My work does not always mark a particular season or place as much as these paintings reflect my personal views on making art. The landscape provides a story line in which to weave colors and shapes across the paper.
As a landscape painter, I am documenting a location and exploration of materials, but more importantly, I am exploring and reacting to my ever-present need to “keep my hand moving.” I like the surfaces, textures, and colors that come fromm the end of a bush or the broken end of a pastel stick. I am most myself when I have an artist’s tool in my hand and I can demonstrate what I envision a feeling to be through a landscape of color. When I am asked “What do you paint?’ I often answer that I create landscapes, but it is much more than a place I am rendering – I am documenting and inner landscape, or a journal of my days as an artist and a teacher. Instead of the language of sound, I use color. Instead of the rhythm of words, I use shape. All you want to know about me is written in the strokes of these paintings.I like to create Pastel paintings in such a way that the movement of the water or the silhouette of a tree is abstracted into colors and shapes not always seen by the camera lens or even the human eye.
Pastel painting can be a smoothly rendered reality, but it is the broken color that holds the light, the energy, and vitality of a place for me. I often work with Pastels because this medium is the most consistent, convenient, and easily handled material I know. Raw, pure colors, without the mixture of turpentine, or the use of a brush, are directly applied to a textured surface. This makes the material a natural expression of the hand and heart. Slowly, the process and the craft melt together in a non-linear, meditative experience, as the colors are applied one on top to the other.
