I have long had this love affair for the mundane here in northern Wisconsin. Plein air events which gather artists from around the country is fun...but for new participants to that event and location, every scene appears as eye candy though local residents have likely well accustomed to shutting out the normal.
I like to imagine were a local...what things would I be sensitive to in my daily passing, things that have long become passive and the mundane.
In northern Wisconsin where I live in a national forest, are 1200 lakes, rivers and streams and many many waterfalls. Perhaps 80-90% of my paintings tend to have water in them in some form. I grew up on water fishing Lake Michigan with my father, and then like my father served in the US Navy or what we liked calling, "the Big Pond!"
I like to imagine were a local...what things would I be sensitive to in my daily passing, things that have long become passive and the mundane.
In northern Wisconsin where I live in a national forest, are 1200 lakes, rivers and streams and many many waterfalls. Perhaps 80-90% of my paintings tend to have water in them in some form. I grew up on water fishing Lake Michigan with my father, and then like my father served in the US Navy or what we liked calling, "the Big Pond!"
But...I have come to enjoy the design I sense within chaos of simple things like dead matted grasses of early Spring...bits of green emerging to promise warmer days. I like the chaos of many vertical grasses and tag alder stems and branches. It is fun to attack the negative space (space in-between and thru) which will define with much greater ease the suggestion of the complex without laboring to depict actually each thing.
8"x 6" Spring Overflow AP
So much around us in nature carries a natural asymmetry (informal visual balance) that may need a little fleshing out to see it. But one task of artists is to take the complex and simplify it so others might see again for the very first time...
6-1/2"x 9" A Little Left Leaning AP
Hope you enjoy these...they are much fun to paint. Its funny when I set up and paint such on location (plein air), and I get someone in a pickup truck drive by giving me that "what the )!$_!# is he doing?" After all, flooded roadsides, edges of wetlands are so common as to be put completely out of mind.
As always, if you click on the images, you will bring up a larger view to see. Thanks
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