Description
Abstract-Contemporary-Modernist and/or a blended combination of all…what is your style? What style do you paint in? How many times I have been asked this question. Why must there “be a style”? I get asked by Galleries, Art show promoters…people…it is like you MUST have a stated “style” to be an artist. Well…I always answer the same “I don’t have a singular painting style, as that would be a trap. Whatever I paint is my style. In this way I can speak volumes on a great many topics”. When you paint in an Automatism way, your style, use of brush stroke, way of handling a palette knife, your use of color varies not only work by work that you produce but moment by moment “within” a particular work.
A painting that may be heading to be a landscape traditional painting all of a sudden takes a turn and is now a contemporary abstraction that somewhat resembles a landscape but is now more about the color and textures and “feel”. Sometimes I am asked “What is art”? “What makes something a work of art”? It is a very complex question yet I think so remarkably simple an answer. To me “Art is whatever you see that creates an emotion or strikes a response within you”.
That is all any good artist hopes to achieve. My art is not about some plan or some social statement or political agenda…my art is about creating an emotional response within the viewer that may have a lasting effect. Hopefully you find one of my works that does this for you!
Landscape Painting, whether Traditional or Modernist- Contemporary, or Abstraction, is the depiction of landscapes in art—natural scenery such as mountains, valleys, trees, rivers, and forests… The painting may be American Landscape, Western, Far Eastern/Oriental etc… contain only one of those Earth-Nature elements such as a tree or contain them all! It does not have to have ALL those elements and may contain even more simplistic elements such as rocks, fallen tree or stump…it is the interpretation of what is seen when standing before nature that works its way into the landscape painting. It is often a remembrance of a time or place long ago… It is more a culmination of what I would feel from what I am seeing…an interpretation and intertwining of complex emotion that creates the landscape on canvas. I do not draw or sketch on the canvas before painting. I create my paint palette and begin painting. I allow whatever it is inside to appear on the canvas. Sometimes it just becomes a landscape. What I paint really is not planned…it begins and it continues and I stop when I stop. Sometimes it is a more modernist or contemporary landscape other times it is a more traditional landscape. It is always a revelation to me!
