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| Just a snippet of what I've started. I didn't want to give it all away. As you can see, I chose to start my canvas with a rusty underpainting of burnt sienna. |
Over
the past few months, I've been exposed to paintings and places that keep
resurfacing in my head. It started when I wandered into two galleries a thousand
miles and a couple of months apart. In one gallery, I was drawn to paintings
where the artist first covered the canvas with a rusty red. At the other
gallery, the artist used a rich black underpainting. In both cases, the color
of the underpaintings shone through, creating exciting affects I couldn’t stop
thinking about.
The
painters’ styles were as different as can be. One offered rich painterly
landscapes lush with textured paint and detail, while the other created vast canvases
with broad, glimmering fields of color—landscapes that touched me like a fading
memory of somewhere I'd been before.
Added
to that were the memories of our trip to the southwest. Driving, driving,
driving across the California desert into Arizona, then on to the Navaho reservation
where the vast openness and layers of mesas and hills march off to pastel dreams of the old ones.
I
couldn't stop looking at the shapes and changing colors, the low winter sun of
the late afternoon drenching the land in warmth, the distant ridges cool and
soft, melting into the sky.
Then,
we drove on to the mountains of Colorado, where fall was well entrenched: the ridges
patchworked with grays, browns, rusts, and taupe against grasses dried to shiny
straw. The colors of a falling-down house, a sweat-worn saddle, torn curtains
faded to a whisper.
Finally,
this soup of inspiration has come together in the form of a new painting I
started over the weekend. For the first time in many weeks, I had a few spare hours
and my studio called to me—much louder than the laundry. So there I went,
falling back into the meditation of shape and color that I love so well.
