celebrating nature
The aim of my art is to celebrate the flora. All of us are aware of the immeasurable value of the products of plants, from food and medicine to furniture, but my art celebrates an aspect of the flora that owes nothing to the industry of humanity. I want to celebrate an oak tree for what it is, not for what we make of it. If I am painting an oak I want it to be in the context of its natural neighbors and I want it to be in good form˜tall and straight if it is a Red Oak from a northern forest; spreading and low to the ground if it is a California Live Oak. These features of context and form...
Read Morestory telling in words
During dinner conversation, I was telling a friend about the story behind one of my paintings. He found the story very interesting and wondered aloud whether I had ever written any of them down. I had not. On his suggestion I printed the stories on sheets with the writing tucked around a small picture of each painting. The sheets were enormously popular at the opening of my exhibition. Everyone who bought a painting wanted a copy of the accompanying story. Over the years people have told me that the stories helped them see features of the painting that they had overlooked. I experienced the...
Read Morestory telling in paint
The empathy I feel for a species is enhanced by knowledge of its natural history and ecology, that is, the story of each species and its relationships with the rest of the natural world. The story shapes the composition of my paintings. I once made a large painting of Black-eyed-Susans with some Ox-eye Daisies in the foreground. The daisies were clearly past their prime, their petals were faded and drooping below swollen seed clusters. I could easily have taken a few weeks off the lives of the daisies to show both ray flowers in their prime, but then I would have failed to tell the story. The...
Read Morethe process
I paint to celebrate flora that are happily living in their natural habitats. I am concerned about our environment but my art is not didactic. I am not trying to persuade the viewer to take any particular position on conservation. On the other hand, perhaps my simple objective of celebrating nature is a good starting point for reevaluating our priorities about nature. We won’t preserve what we don’t value.I work in a studio from photographs. I find that this is the best way to capture nature in its wild, messy state. Often pristine Nature is found in places where setting up an...
Read Moregenre
Finding the place of my paintings within the world of art is perhaps a task better left to those who study art. My guess is that my paintings lie somewhere at the crossroads between naturalism and Impressionism. Surely what I do is far from the traditional Naturalism epitomized by pale pastel drawings of flowers, fruit and leaves, neatly arranged over a cursive script of the botanical name. Yet, I was pleased when a friend, who was a professor of forestry, was able to identify every tree in my paintings by genus and species.Neither am I focused exclusively on capturing a moment of light, as...
Read More