Nature and Abstraction

Micro and Macro

Walking around looking at nature in the Rocky Mountains gives me much visual information to consider using in my paintings. In the works in my previous post you can see patterns that come directly from natural objects like dried seed pods. The movement of branches in the woods really makes me want to draw those lines and how they interact and intersect in space.
Nature is predictable in the sense that season follows season, plants bloom at certain times.
It's our interaction with nature that brings surprising and unexpected pleasure.

The character Frenhofer in Balzac's said "Nature provides a succession of rounded outlines that run into one another"
I certainly see that every day everywhere I look.
and
 "It is not the language of painters but the language of nature, which we should listen to, the feeling for the things themselves; for reality is more important than the feeling for pictures"

I mostly agree with this quote of Vincent Van Gogh
but I think a lot of the language of painters too.

Subterranean

Subterranean One, Oil on wood, 10" x 10" x 2"

Subterranean Two, Oil on wood, 10" x 10" x 2"

These two paintings are based on a series I did at The Vermont Studio Center in  2010.
(see four images below)

I was trying to interpret in oil paint on wood what I did with watercolor, gouache and ink on paper. 
The original four pieces were done from drawings of aspen tree trunks.
When I turned the paper 90 degrees to the left and all of a sudden the drawings lost their tree-ness.
The edge of the trunk became a horizon line and the shapes and forms were underneath the earth!
I imagine these as things growing underground, thus the name Subterranean for the series.
I recently read an article about the abstract painter Mark Grotjahn, whose wonderful Butterfly paintings I saw at the new Blum and Poe Gallery in NYC.  About those paintings, he said "I found that rotating it (the canvas 90 degrees) took all the landscape out, so it became a non-objective painting.