“Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.” Pablo Picasso

 

“Worry a little bit everyday and in a lifetime you will lose a couple of years. If something is wrong, fix it if you can. But train yourself not to worry: worry never fixes anything.” Ernest Hemingway

 

I find writing about myself and my artwork a chore. However, digging into the how and why of my work reveals a better understanding of common elements and themes and hints at directions moving forward. Looking back over 2020 and all the paintings that happened, almost of their own accord, I recall the paralysis of worry and stress and then my escape through the solitude and indifference of those wide-open spaces and huge vistas.

 

I am a landscape painter, working mostly in oils and sometimes acrylics, with a distinct preference for a limited color palette and a tendency to paint intuitively both in studio and en plein air. I live in Alberta and am most drawn to the largeness and loneliness of the prairies and the skies above. The roads, fence-lines, coulees, and rivers and streams that thread through the land seem secondary to the middle-grounds and back-grounds. Pretence has no place here and the wind strips away thoughts and prayers and my individual sense of self, leaving little more then the constants of birth and death. Some see emptiness: I see honesty. Paraphrasing author Gretel Ehrlich, the prairies and skies are completely disinterested in my cares and concerns and that steadies and comforts me.

 

I seldom pay much attention to foregrounds in my paintings. Elements like roads and fences and trees and power poles are secondary and become part of the design to help the viewer find their way into and around all that distance and mood. As Gretel Ehrlich says so eloquently in her book, The Solace of Open Spaces, “Space heals but that works best when we don’t fill it up.” I paint quickly and am using bigger and bigger brushes as I continue upscaling my canvas and panel sizes. I do not like painting over and into dried paint so often stop working a piece early as my schedule can delay going back in. The little pieces are easy as they rarely take more then a day however the large paintings require a bit more planning to ensure layers and areas do not dry too much between painting sessions. Even so, I dislike the look of finer details and will wipe or scrape those away without hesitation when they start to show up. Often the appearance of these tells me I am uncertain or feeling ambiguous towards my original intention. To me, picking at a piece seems pointless rather like the way scavengers pick bare bones. With my art I feel less is almost always more, and overworking a painting takes away from the viewers’ enjoyment of finding their own comfort and solace in all that space.

 

Roads have been showing up in my paintings this past year, as have clouds and stormy skies. Normally I love blue pigments and use a lot of Ultramarine Blue over a Burnt Sienna underpainting, but in 2020 blue skies presented a struggle and just seemed off. Consequently, I painted with a lot of yellow and red. Interestingly, as soon as I received my first vaccination, I started mixing and painting some blue skies again.

 

“Art is a line around your thoughts.” Gustav Klimt