Half Street Studio

My formative education is in landscape painting and life drawing. It is how I continue to approach my work and guiding belief to my creative philosophies. I sometimes jokingly say “my failure to grow up as landscape painter may explain why I have a profound appreciation for printing with leaves”. What is hard earned in balancing scale and proportion in my figure drawing I easily drape on my dress form. Earthen colors I once struggled so much to mimic with paint chroma flow effortlessly from leaf pigment. For all the hours I spent observing, sorting symmetry out of chaos and sketching nature's patterns none of my efforts ever gained so harmonious a rhythm and organic comparability as the overlapping contours in printed leaves. In all sincerity I most likely can still muster rendering a realistic landscape but, it is my capacity to respond emotionally to my experience in and with my natural surround I depend on most. Some of my favorite responsive landscape paintings are in Alan Gussow body of work A Painter’s Nature. “Gussow’s unique imagery captures the intimate link between man and the environment, invoking his personal encounters with the smells, sounds, tastes, and tactile sensations of nature.”~ Driscoll Babcock Galleries. Poet Richard Wilbur, in his introduction to Gussow’s book A Sense of Place says that three conditions must be met before an artist can paint a place, "observation, the adaptation of technique and the discovery of what in himself the scenery might declare" and this at last makes it "possible for him to paint .... " "It implies," Wilbur continues, "no easy affinity, no facile personalization or imposition of mood but a struggle with something powerfully other." The best landscape painters also know the value of waiting. They know, too, the moment when the scenery declares itself. Then they begin. So much of what is mentioned "to paint a place" is for me true of using natural pigments with natural forces "to print a place", especially the value of waiting. Time can do all things, to "print a place" the artist leans in hard with an approximation of how, when and where natural alchemy is comfortable with making relationships. Most every plant life match making will result with a mark. Some plant life simply has more to say than others and some are absolutely the life of the party in due season, given some time most will make lasting impressions.