Variations on Landscape

Life is strange sometimes. One moment you're complaining that you are bored and need something more; the next moment your wish is granted and now it's too, too much. The new job is keeping me hopping and at night I'm too tired to even contemplate lifting a brush. Come the weekend there's too many chores to catch up on.

But it's been several weeks now, and I finally am feeling a bit more relaxed, able to focus on something other than work. In fact, it is an absolute necessity -- otherwise, one could go crazy.

Right now I'm sitting in my studio surrounded by chaos. Over the weeks I've dumped things here and there, stashed half-finished works on the floor or on the work table. I think I've even lost a batch of brushes as the turps dried up and now they're hard as bricks.

Nevertheless, some small quick works have been done in an attempt to keep my hand in, to keep the creative flow trickling along --

Breaking Light

acrylic, 12" x 12" panel

A view of the CT River in late winter -- a sense of a spring thaw perhaps, colors muted, early morning light breaking along the opposite shoreline

Farm Fields

acrylic on paper; 3.5" x 5.5"

Altogether different, a petite view of an autumn farm field, harrows of fresh-mown hay resting in the late afternoon sun --

Desert Moon

acrylic on 12" x 12" panel

the last landscape, dream-like, of a place not familiar to me in reality but perhaps internally;  a vast, open space, somewhere that I would like to be, cradled in a tapestried arroyo under moonlight?

Not sure.  Perhaps . . .

Whether working in a large, orderly studio or cramped in the front seat of a car, sketching on a scrap of paper -- that is the studio, that is the space, the moment in which one must do the thing itself despite setbacks, lack of time, lack of confidence. 

It just is . . .

The aim of art is to represent

not the outward appearance of things,

but their inward significance. 

Aristotle