Liquid Green Sky
Forest of Sorrows
Dormant Landscape
Gloaming Cove
Allurement
Fossil Sky
Tidal Forest
Felled
Twilit Landscape n1
Symbolist Landscape n1
The Road Less Taken: Early in my development I used still-lifes as a point of departure for invention. I have been slower coming to landscape since invention must still adhere to the general rules of landscape: i.e., figure/ground. The same may be said (broadly) of still-lifes.
Landscapes of The Mind: Landscapes in the wild are rarely suitable for painting. From Poussin to the present day, one must arrange them, usually by pruning away branches or whole trees, so to clear paths around or through them. I agree with Arthur Schopenhauer who said oil painting and landscape are perfectly wedded in their metaphysics.
In these schemes, one borrows from Nature without copying her. This assemblage or theatrical backdrop approach to landscapes has a long history in art, dating from Medievalism and the Renaissance. With the invention of photography, imagination is less common as an organizing principle.
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Landscapes and Symbolism: Historically, the inclusion of dead trees in landscape painting has functioned similar to toppled pillars in Greek ruins. They add mystery and decay, but also, like foreshortened skeletal arms reaching into the foreground, they create a depth of field where otherwise only a hanging curtain of green foliage would confront the viewer.
Templates vs Starting from Zero: As stated on my homepage, I am not a prolific painter. This is another reason why I have gravitated to landscape in recent years. Increasingly, landscape motifs are used as backgrounds in my feature paintings.
Landscape requires less pure invention, which is the hardest part of every painting I create. Although the templates of landscape are straightforward, repeatable, and reliable as formulas, they are highly varied by simple tweaks.
Dali, Landscape, and Me: My interest in painting began with the discovery of Salvador Dali when I was a teenager. I received a book of his paintings and a set of oil paints one Christmas in the mid-1970s. I copied specific passages from his paintings with a view to dissect technique, and having achieved a passable facsimile I filed away what I learned for later use. I did not paint again for several years. Dali’s influence is everywhere on this website. The first piece of music I composed in Garageband, Ouefs de Dali, was a tribute to him.
The bare unclutteredness of the high-plains desert of Catalonia provided Dali with the blank canvas upon which his vivid imagination could build. However, landscape was never an end-in-itself for him.
Other painters have used landscape variously in imaginative end-in-itself ways. These include American painters like Alexandre Hogue, Rockwell Kent, Eyvind Earle, John Rogers Cox, Edward Hopper, Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and Maxfield Parrish. I would also add Russian mystic painter Nicholas Roerich to this list.
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