Looking south down the river from the corner above Lower Ranch.

 

Do you know your why?

 

My friend who is also an artist, asked me recently, ‘What do you think my why is?’, as in why she makes art. All I could come up with right at that moment was, ‘Because you can’.

 

This question as it pertains to my art, is a new thing to me, but then I am only very recently rejoining the art world as an active painter following a lengthy interruption. I do not recall this question ever being asked at any point previous and to me it seems almost an inner circle thing. An artist and art educator I discovered on social media several years ago, has been pushing this question as an essential step in developing a serious art practice. At first, I thought she meant it as a way of creating a personal mission statement, a way of describing what I see as my purpose as an artist, both to inform my audience and help me focus on why I even want to create anything. And from this, extrapolate why I paint, or, why I make art, and ultimately what does my artwork mean. But I still couldn’t find an answer that I felt adequately fit without sounding trite and ready-made.

 

I kept chasing this question around in my mind these past couple months only to determine I misunderstood the exercise right from the start. As soon as I changed the question from ‘what is my why’, to ‘why do I paint what I paint’ I got beyond the surface and found layer after layer of personal meaning.

 

The Subject Matters

 

I have painted and drawn many different subjects over the years and have enjoyed all. But I found landscape painting very difficult. Although it was always what I wanted to create, the pieces I made never seemed to match my ideas or what I saw in my mind’s eye. I could draw the landscape with pencils, charcoal and pen and ink but not with brushes and paint. I essentially stopped creating art for years and am sure self-doubt including my awareness of lacking painting skills had a lot to do with it. When I finally began painting again a few years ago I deliberately skipped the drawing steps and jumped right into painting. My work wasn’t great, but I decided not worry about it and just kept painting. With every piece I began discovering some of the nuances involved. And slowly the landscapes I saw in my mind began to populate the canvases in front of me.

 

Trying to come up with my ‘why’ led me back over these recent paintings since I started creating again. And there it is: I am drawn to landscape, but not just any landscape. I prefer the large, lonely, sweeping, harsh and difficult yet grand landscapes that dwarf me. I lose my sense of place or self-importance in face of this and really feel my mortality and how short a time any of us have in this life and how fast that life passes. And to me it seems to reinforce how little my “I” matters and with that comes terrific clarity and freedom.

 

To most viewers, my paintings will be just landscapes. Viewers may or may not get a sense of the why behind each piece and I may or may not suggest some of the why by way of a title or backstory. However, I have my why and that is enough.

 

Sometimes the River Turns Gold, 10"x10", oil on stretched canvas