NEW WORKS GALLERY

Translating the Landscape

The impetus for these paintings is a personal need to translate and document the decline of the family farm. The farm is related to life force - food, nature, sun, oxygen. I sense this lifestyle, its strength in solitude and isolation is disappearing. Driving the back roads to photograph farms and remnants of them, I see this way of life is losing its place - being pushed out by strip malls and subdivisions of cookie-cutter homes. This makes me more aware of losing the connection to our earth. At the same time we are losing our history as storytelling around the dinner table is replaced with blogging.

So these are the stories as I imagine them.

Translating the familiar landscape of a farm field to a two dimensional surface has become a wondrous experience. I bring my years of abstract painting to the landscape: a bridging of time and expression. I work a rich surface of paint to read as intimate detail, introducing a degree of surprise into a matter of fact. It is my task as an artist to empower the materials through application, movement and placement, urging the viewers to feel the paint and read it in a way that is meaningful to them. One of my favorite artists, Emil Schumacher states "… pictures of the life of the earth. The surfaces, smooth or rough to the touch, heavy or light, continuous or intermittent, luminous or matt, seem to owe their origin to pure chance, and never seek or attain to a lifeless perfection". I strive to preserve the integrity of the past while appealing in a contemporary form. I mean these paintings to be a reminder of what is lost of our farming history by the bulldozing of the earth and to serve as a reminder that not all progress is growth.