On branches and subtle hues

There is something about a grove of trees that gives me a quiet and introspective feeling. This is often the reason I feel the need to "get outside" - that sense of perspective that comes from finding a quiet, branchy place to re-order my thoughts. Tree shapes in a painting naturally evoke a sense of peaceful connectedness for me. Incidentally, this habit of studying tree shapes has made me a bit of a visual xylologist. Oh, how I do love trees, trees and fancy words!

It's funny how nature can be so disorderly. Trees rarely grow up in a straight vertical line, with the exception of palm trees, perhaps. More often the elements push them in different directions, causing no two trees to grow in exactly the same way. Then there is the leftover branch and foliage matter that collects up in the wild. Wolf Kahn often refers to these as "tangles" in his pastels of forested places. They can form beautiful masses of curvilinear lines that are impossibly complicated.

When faced with a tangle and many complex tree shapes, I like to adjust the pallet so that the shapes stand out more. These two paintings seemed to require muted pallets to properly evoke a sense of quiet. I've tried forest paintings in hues of cadmium red, only to end up with little forest fire paintings. It's the wrong mood. No, a forest needs blues and greens, with only perhaps a hint of peach or violet.

Old and new, lots of borrowed and blue

Communication

Recently I redesigned my entire web site, which was a major undertaking due to the accumulation of images in the "sold" category. Yes, I know, wa wa wa. Poor me, so much sold work! Seriously, though, there were about 300 image files to sort through. It proved to be a great way to get an overview of my body of work. I had to select only 64 images to represent my "sold" body of work, so I got to thinking about the all time favorite pieces.

One of them is this little abstract number called "Communication". I say little, but actually it's 4 feet wide and 2 feet tall. It was one of the first pieces ever sold through a gallery, so I don't even know where it went, *sniff*. It never writes or calls, either!

The title was a function of things I was going through at the time on a personal level. It had to do with relationships, vulnerability, and the magic of being able to look in someone's eyes and see a whole universe in there staring back at you. There is a entire world in each person that sometimes can be surprising.

Aloha Vista

My new favorite piece, "Aloha Vista", is about space and possibilities. Most of my landscape compositions have featured intimate little wooded places. I've always had a fondness for those hidden spaces people go to find themselves again and reconnect with their own higher nature. It was a little breakthrough to discover this spot on top of a hill where you could actually see all the way to the ocean. There was all that exposure and yet still there was that sense of intimacy and connectedness.