LANDSCAPES

The natural world is the artist’s point of reference. It may evoke harmony or chaos, tranquility and healing or violence and pain. Yet in all this diversity there is an undeniable unity. This holds true for the poet and the composer as well as the visual artist. Both the ‘realist” and the abstract painter draw from this inexhaustible source.

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I work in the Western tradition of landscape painting. Sometimes consciously—usually subconsciously—I am influenced by the works that have come before me. I particularly admire the paintings of John Constable, Camile Corot, Claude Monet, Isaac Levitan, and Joaquin Sorolla, Winslow Homer, John Sargent, James Whistler. I have enjoyed the work of more recent painters like the Canadian Seven (landscapes), Kiffin Williams (Welsh), William Wendt, Edgar Payne, C.S. Price, Clyde Apsvig, Scott Christiansen, Michael Workman and Kathleen Dumphy.

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There are many approaches to landscape painting, but perhaps for me the primary thing to attain is a quality of light that impresses the viewer with an experience of a particular time and place. In his book, Gist of Art, John Sloan describes a landscape [painting] as a “portrait of a

place.”