2008, Oil on canvas, 48"w x 36"h
By definition, plein-air painting means to work on-site, to experience nature first-hand. For me, this seemingly passé mode of painting is today injected with new relevance and urgency as it helps underscore how removed most of our own experiences and even images of nature have become. In my works, I want the viewer to discover how the landscape reveals itself in cumulative and unexpected ways — ways that will hopefully create a desire to engage more fully, directly and positively in our own environment and to do so before it is too late.
My latest works feature large-scale, on-site painting installations of dense landscape that overwhelm the viewer’s perceptual senses. Each individual painting is created over the course of one or more days in an intense wet-on-wet cumulative manner that underscores the complex nature of trying to capture the multidimensional and ever-changing experience of being (in that specific location). The final works are as much about the materiality of the paint and the physicality of the painting process as they are about mixing and mashing the illusionist possibilities of painting with its real abstract nature and somehow making the final work seem/feel/look “right”.
This work was painted on-site in mid-November, 2008, at a large Texas Hillcountry ranch adjacent to Lost Maples State Park. It shows the side of a dried up rock creek blanketed with fallen yellow maple leaves.
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