I wanted to give you a glimpse into my thoughts behind the paintings in this show next week at Camellia Art in Bluffton, SC. Painting for a show is a bit different than supplying a gallery with ongoing work. More thought goes into it, in order to present a cohesive group of work. And when it is a joint show with another artist, as this one is, it becomes even more about playing off of one another’s work and avoiding it feeling repetitive once it is hung.
** The photos below are close ups of the work in the show. (To see the whole painting click on the link under the photo.)
My work is predominately focused on the coastal area of Georgia and South Carolina, or the lowcountry, and more specifically on the mood created by the sky and the water. I did branch out, literally though, and paint a couple of paintings that concentrate on the maritime forest that borders the marsh.
The climate conditions here manage to encourage everything to grow feverishly. Sometimes it feels as though trees and vines grow by the foot instead of by millimeters each day. I love the entanglements that these areas encourage…. Moss, vines, ferns, palms, trees…. they all grow in what appears to be unorganized chaos. The weaving and layering can be so complicated and exhaustive to paint if you try and focus on each individual element, but taken as a whole, just layers of shapes and color, it is much more enjoyable and somehow makes more sense to me. I have found though, that I have to be in the mood to immerse myself in a painting like this.
Water is meditation to me. The movement, the reflection, the repetition. These paintings are as much about the reflection of the sky as they are about the movement of the water. It is impossible to separate the two. One becomes the other and I have found that they have to be painted that way for the painting to flow.
There is a temptation to get caught up in the anatomy of a wave in a painting of the ocean. It is seductive. But the problem in doing that, I have found, is that the water doesn’t move. It feels as though the wave is frozen in mid roll. Our eye sees it as a solid instead of a liquid. Water in a painting needs to feel as though it can move at any moment. That is the challenge of it, and sometimes I am successful and sometimes not so much.
And then there is the sky. I wanted to do several paintings featuring a variation of sky … early morning, sunset, midday.
The play of warms and cools in the clouds was so interesting to paint in these paintings. Just like water, clouds need to feel like they can move through the sky but most importantly … that they can float. Even the darkest and most foreboding cloud should feel as if it is still vapor, not a solid. Clouds shouldn’t look like rocks in the sky.
But the sky doesn’t exist without the land and water below. The paintings shown above have different degrees of detail in the handling of the landscape. Some needed more depth, and some just a suggestion, so that the each element wasn’t fighting for attention.
Once again, if you are interested in seeing one of the paintings in its entirety, click on the link below the photo.
If you are nearby, I hope you will join us!
All beautiful, what a lovely show it will be. Best of luck to both of you.
All are quite lovely!!! I love your work and I love your writings!