June 22, 2010

Drawing trees, on a walk, the direction and movement of their limbs, interconnected, and the shapes of the spaces they make. These drawings often are the start for a studio painting.

"The walk magnified is the journey" - the big landscape and then the closeness of a tree.

COLORADO LANDSCAPE
I found A POEM IS A WALK by A.R. Ammons - "I take the walk to be the externalization of an

interior seeking...".

There are many drawings done on walks in these books that I carry with me. So much looking,

then really seeing something, and then making a drawing.

June 15, 2010

The land and the aspen tree has been the focus of my work for the last ten years.

Flowers, Birds and Landscapes

Last week in San Francisco at a great bookstore, Forest Books on 16th Street in the Mission I found a catalog from a show at the Berkeley Art Museum. What I read about Ch'en Hung-shou (1598-1652) and his paintings in Album of Flowers, Birds and Landscape speaks to work completed at my residency at the Vermont Studio Center:

"... conscious, highly sophisticated distortions of form and scale as a manifestation of stylistic virtuosity. The other leaves in the album attest to the same originality, ostensibly following very old traditions but in fact achieving ironic commentary on those traditions through calculated distortions. In these the artist singles out a subject and depicts it with extreme, almost obsessive, concentration on eccentrically refined qualities. In two leaves, for example, one representing a peony and the other a butterfly perching on a flower, delicately drawn lines spread out from the base of each flower petal and disappear at it's outer edge. These lines then continue on, but in different directions, on other petals. Within the form of each flower the delicate, refined, systematic lines flow in each assigned area. The textural movement of each area is associated with that of the neighboring areas, constituting a flat major pattern with decorative sub-patterns and building up a well adorned substantiality, a finished work, in empty space.