Landscape Abstractions
Detail of Ross Reflections View painting »
These paintings are loosely based on the landscape, though I would say that their more important aim is to convey the emotional experience of a place.
For example, in Ross Reflections I tried to capture a sense of the cold stillness of the reservoir and the air, and the sense of melancholy that I sometimes feel in a place of beauty. This melancholy comes from a desire to hang on to this moment forever, a fleeting sense of aesthetic arrest. I hope I've honored these feelings in this painting.
One of the things that I love about watercolors is the relationship the paints have with the paper. Watercolors are dependent on the white of the paper underneath for their luminosity. It is called a transparent medium: light travels through the pigment, bounces off the white paper underneath, back through the pigment and to the viewer's eyes. Oil paint, on the other hand, is an opaque medium that relies on the reflection of light off the paint pigment for the perception of color.
In painting watercolors, the paper is a principal element that I always take into consideration. These paintings were painted with an eye towards letting the white of the paper become a foregrounding part of the composition, to become an active element.
All of the paintings in this series are available for purchase as prints.
