When I paint, I work mostly on site, returning
often and then finish the painting in my studio. I also work from
drawings, sketched in more remote locations where lugging gear is
too cumbersome. More recently, I reference photographs taken when
time to sketch is limited, or to hold certain patterns of light
that are forever shifting.
Nature is my muse and guide. By immersing myself in my surroundings
I am able to lose myself, allowing me to respond fully to the colors,
patterns, and compositions that nature presents. But this way of
being is not a given. It takes time and searching to find the right
place, to open my senses, and then to see.
Whatever deeply engages me eventually finds it way into my work.
|
Fields
of Jackson Artist Statement
I am drawn to fields for what they stir up in me. When I look at
them, spreading wide and uninterrupted, I enjoy watching their shifting
colors and movements, smelling the sweet hay when freshly cut, or
walking aimlessly about in the tall grasses as I chew on the end
of a long, golden stem.
I have never had to tend a field for a living, as my father did
growing up on a farm in Bartlett, and as his father did before him,
and so on back to 1783 when Richard Garland, one of the town’s
first settlers, began clearing a small plot of land for cultivation.
In 1919, my mother, not yet one year old, came with her family to
summer in Jackson in the cabin they would purchase the next year.
Through time, they bought some adjacent land, which included a large
field, harvested each year for hay.
Decades later when I was born, fields along the hillsides and rivers
of both Bartlett and Jackson were already in my blood. When I visited
my grandparents in Bartlett, I was delightedly swept up in farm
life there, “helping” with the cows, the haying, or
whatever else in the barn or fields caught my attention and imagination.
When in Jackson, I would lose myself in its fields, walking on old
paths that lead from one to another.
Now, when I go to the fields to paint, the familiar experience of
sensing their essence and history is as important to me as the images
that evolve on canvas.
And yet there is another reason why I paint the fields. I feel an
urgency to record what remains today of these open spaces. They
are an essential piece of our heritage, a way of life, that is rapidly
disappearing. Their value as foraging grounds for livestock, as
a source of hay to feed those animals and in turn their keepers,
and as ground to plant and harvest food is becoming part of the
past.
Some of my paintings depict site specific fields with historically
significant houses and recognizable mountains to reference their
locations. Other images are composites of many different fields,
their source being more remembered and felt than seen.
|
