untitled landscape 6, 6" x 6"
It's the place I go when I want to slip off to sleep or need a hard stare. It's the place I found out west, after growing up on a diet of rolling green hills dotted with old farms and mellow cows staged for Wyeth paintings. But despite the number I'd painted in recent years, they weren't my focus. I certainly wasn't going to paint a barn. That was the territory of a younger Scott, those pesky perpetually talented Wyeths and their swarming armies of drab imitators. But here I am, thinking of that barn, that hill, that mountain and river.
That hill, the dry swell of a behemoth's back, draws the perfect line between hard land and the arcing wall of bottomless sky. It's haunches crisscrossed by game or jeep trails are worn into gentle folds by time, wind and storm. That field, freshly tumbled, giving way to ridges trimmed by shadowed forest and orchard. Behind, a range of mountains is a firm blue smear below milky cobalt. That river with quiet belligerence winding through a valley from some unknown source mirrors to an unknown end. It's mirrored surface of clouds, birds and reeds masking its movement and intentions. And amongst them, our presence - an old barn, the scribble of a road, the pattern of crops and tilled soil, a row of fence posts, giant white windmills scattered like a titan's jacks, all scratching straight against the round of nature.
With pick axe in hand, I dove back into painting, something I haven't been able to do the last months with any real energy. Not unlike going too long without sex, the painting went fast and furious. Some of the pent up ideas well stewed in the anxiety of the past year found their release.
Best yet, as I'd hoped, those more studied still lives had done as I'd hoped. Though they became more, they were started as exercises. The time constraint and specificity of subject demanded and inspired a certainty that's sometimes lost in the hedging excuses, "I'm just building it up, getting the surface ready for real paint." You can't do that when you're painting it in a day. You can't consider washes of color nuancing any spark to death. You have to just paint the damn things.
We'll have to see how these translate to larger works, but these new things crackle. There might even be a barn.
A few of them:
untitled landscape 1, 6" x 6"
untitled landscape 2, 6" x 6"
untitled landscape 4, 6" x 6"