Van Dop Gallery

For the past 40 years, I have turned again and again to the solace and the threat of land. Early paintings explored wilderness unmarked by even a telephone wire. Later I stopped looking from afar moved closer to the landscape as though I lived within it and painted it with its indicators of human, animal and architectural intrusion. In the beginning, I put paint and canvas in my vehicle and searched the countryside. Having found a likely spot, I stopped and painted on location. More recently, almost yearly, I explored the back roads near my childhood rural home. Each year, with camera and sketchbook, I moved in closer and closer to the ragged trees that lined the farm fields. In the process, my painting of landscape became less about the landscape and more about the painting. Recent portraits of the land are a many-sided struggle among memory, sketch notes, photos and the resisting language of paint. The result is LANDSCAPE PORTRAITS. Why portraits? Because the earth takes our presence PERSONally. "

In LANDSCAPE PORTRAIT'S I present issues of nature vs. man in order to reconstruct their relationship. This is the role of painting: to present in a non-discursive way elements of our human concerns so that intuition has a role in connecting information which threatens to disastrously disconnect. What also interests me now is not making a landscape, per se, but finding a metaphor for how ephemeral jigsaw shapes of sky grab hold of tree branches, trunks, and leaves. In reality, this immaterial air is a kind of nothing - negative space. But if one really looks, it becomes as intrusive in the eyes' gaze as branch or leaf or paint. The opposites unite, and it is as though a breath of air becomes body. The earth struggles to breathe. The earth breathes fire, a suggestion of apocalypse. October, 202"3