“Inspiration
Point” is the theme for this year’s Stormy Weather Festival at the Dragonfire
Gallery in Cannon Beach, OR. I loved this theme because it got me to actually
focus on what inspires me and put it into words. I've always known that
painting is a spiritual act and that what is coming out of me comes from deep
inside and is very soul-filled. But taking the time to shine a light on this
inner reality and write about it revealed to me the extent of the internalized
data that is held inside. I was actually a bit surprised at the importance of
history and global experiences and relationships, even on small simple little
paintings like these three. All three are based on scenes from the two trips to
Europe I enjoyed in the past year and were painted especially for “Inspiration
Point”. Here’s my Artist Statement for that show:
Inspiration
Point
I
travel. A lot. I take a great many photos on these trips and they are my
treasures. I spend my days absorbing all the visual information, viewing angles
and capturing compositions. An advantage of digital photography is that I can
edit and crop and enhance the photos while I am still on the trip. So each day
becomes a mosaic of the photos I took that day, a memory collage of that day’s
experiences. I’ll never be able to paint all of the photos, but when I do paint
one, it’s like I get to travel back in time and place. When I paint, I’m often
in a meditative state, so it’s a bit of an altered reality. When I paint one of
these trip photos, I get to relive the experience back at that moment and in
that place. I’m aware that I’m in my own studio, but at the end of the day, I
feel like I’ve just returned from some distant land.
In “Aegean
Sunlight”, the time travel takes me to Mykonos, Greece, in October 2014.
Mykonos is a wind-swept town on a small island of the same name. On Mykonos
it’s all about the sky and the water and the wind. The palette is dominated by
3 colors: white buildings and windmills, blue sky, blue sea, and blue and red
doors and stairs and domes. The painting captures for me the essence of my day
there: the warmth of the sunlight, the warm blue of the sky, the cool blue of
the shadows on the white building, the red dome, the layers of color in the
stucco revealing years of wind-swept history. I painted it from a single photo
reference but the inspiration came from the dynamic beauty of this historic,
light-filled village and its remarkable natural setting.
In
“Italian Cypress”, the time travel takes me back to a day in May 2015.
We spent the day exploring the Val d’Orcia in the heart of Tuscany. We visited
beautiful hill towns, ancient Roman baths, medieval villages, a Romanesque
abbey, a Renaissance garden, a picturesque 15th Century chapel, vineyards and
poppy fields. It was, for me, the best day of a seven-week trip. Actually, one
of the best days of my life. This tiny painting captures four of the dominant
features of that day: the sky, the light, the sculptural Tuscan hills, and the
cypress trees. I loved the cypress trees! Each one has its own personality and
heroic stature. It’s a simple little painting, but it has a huge backstory. I
painted it using a single photo as reference, but the inspiration came from all
the beauty and history that filled that entire magical day.
In
“Village in Tuscany”, the time travel takes me to a tiny 15th Century
village in Tuscany. Montegabbro. We had the pleasure of staying there for a
week in a restored stable rented from a handsome young man whose family had
owned much of the property for centuries. His mother was born upstairs and
there is an 11th Century stone chapel that the family still uses for an annual
Mass and celebration every spring. Parts of the village are still uninhabitable
– stone structures with no windows or roofs. The village is sited in a breathtaking
landscape with 360 degree views and a mile long cypress lined driveway. I loved
it so much I probably took 500 photos, although I forced myself to edit that
down to half. This tiny painting shows the approach to the village and its
cypress-lined driveway across a plowed field and with Tuscan hills hazy in the
distance. In painting it, I not only got to travel to that week in May, 2015,
but I also was inspired by the generations of the families who have inhabited
it for the past 900 years.
