on landscape painting

Artist's statements are usually pretentious in varying degrees... and this one will probably be no different, but that's beside the point. With that said, in the broadest sense, my work is about a different way of seeing or looking at things primarily through the avenue of landscape painting. Mostly I try to present the landscape that most people do not focus on. Some of my paintings can be straightforward but the majority of them are landscapes... with a twist.

When you look at a landscape the most obvious feature of it is the vista, the far-reaching view to the horizon or a mountain range, where the land meets the sky. For as long as there has been landscape painting, the vista has been the hallmark of it. The landscape traditionally is a view of "something" off in the distance, and that view is more or less presented in its totality - the scenic view you might call it. Over the years, when I have worked in the landscape mode, more and more I have purposely de-emphasized the vista so that the viewer must concentrate on other things within the landscape. Most of the time I have employed various odd objects in the foreground of the painting to focus attention away from the vista, when there has been one, or have entirely eliminated the vista altogether. Part of the reason for this is to break the indoctrinating (hypnotic?) effect of the way we look at things, for example, while driving on the American interstate highway system - the turnout off the highway for the designated scenic view. The other reason has to do with the bias toward pristine, unspoiled landscapes, particularly those of the West. You don't really see these so much anymore, or you have to hike in deeper into the wilderness to find them, but the proportion in which they dominate landscape painting is still almost universal. It may be reassuring for us to think that there are still unspoiled spaces in abundance but they really are becoming fewer.

Most landscapes in the environment now exist in a "ruined" state when judged against the ideal, for example, the 19th century ideal of the unspoiled, untamed wilderness. I look at it more as an "evidence of Man" kind of thing, but what is placed in the landscape becomes part of the landscape itself. So when someone questions why there is a propane tank in the painting of a high mountain landscape as in Above Timberline no. 1, the painting is simply a recording of what I came upon when I hiked up to that high point. In that painting there is no way to not focus on the propane tank as it is the most visually dominating aspect of the piece. Additionally I don't look at that landscape as being "ruined" at all; it simply involves a shift in perspective.

Probably the culmination of this direction was Scenic View , which depicts a snowy landscape up close and a sign inscribed with the words "Scenic View". And yet there is no depiction of that view in the composition other than a small snippet of sky in the upper right-hand corner. Hardly a scenic view at all although it is a landscape. That painting probably more than any other I've done sums up the approach I had taken in landscape painting up to that point. I think now, since I have been working with cloud formations as "landscapes" in themselves for several years and working from photographs for almost 20 years, my own definition of what constitutes a landscape to me and my current work is going through a transitional period where I am working more from digital photography and the [seemingly] endless possibilities that can arise from it.