Ever since I started painting, I’ve consistently gone out and painted landscapes from observation. It is remained a through line through my artistic practice from my teen years to today. While I don’t often exhibit my plein air work, I use that vocabulary and that methodology in my wholly fictional studio paintings in order to give them a sense of veracity, and an idiosyncratic, lived-in solidity.
These paintings are clearly fictions, possessed of their own inner logic; a storybook logic, with a storybook’s sense of grandeur. In addition to the plein air DNA, they are also an amalgam of recollected memory (seen through the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia), art historical research, and pure invention. Drawing inspiration from such disparate elements as Golden Age illustration, 8-bit video games, and comic book splash pages, I use unambiguous, hard-edged specificity to create an idealized and consciously artificial representation of the complexity of the natural world.
In order to create more grandiose and heroic landscapes, I try to imbue them with certain sense of hyper-reality that makes them believable, but not realistic.. Most of that is accomplished by trying to push as much form into the painting as possible. The grass, rocks, and all compositional elements have more overt form that one would naturally see. A painting I often think about is Jan Lieven’s “Still Life of Books”(1629). It is just dripping with form and solidity- the pages of his books are as thick as lasagna pasta. While this overemphasis does not create an optically realistic depiction of a book, it results in the most solid looking books ever put to canvas. It’s more real than real. It’s better than real.
Landscape is less of a objective depiction of reality than a physical manifestation of nostalgia. As pointed out by Kenneth Clark in his seminal book, Landscape into Art (1949), it wasn’t until people were sufficiently removed from actually living in nature that they were able to romanticize it into a place of peace and spiritual fulfillment. Much as the genre of landscape itself is based on an idealized fantasy, so too is nostalgia for one’s halcyon childhood days. I grew up on the coast of Maine, and a memory that always comes back to me was our family outings- to a child, piloting a barely seaworthy boat out to the rockbound islands in Frenchman’s Bay was a dangerous seafaring adventure to a new frontiers. We never knew adversity we would face, nor what treasures we were going to find. Those islands were magical, self-contained worlds where anything could happen- much like Painting itself.
The artifice of Nostalgia and the search for the ideal, in both subject and execution, is the central thrust of my work. Though I strive for the transcendent, I believe my many years of plein air experience lends a lived-in veracity to these fantastic landscapes. These paintings depict unattainable utopias, evoking a sense of hope and yearning. They feel grounded, because they are based on a true story.