Real. Nice.

TREE FARM (2008), oil on canvas.  24" x 24"

Now that the show of my paintings has closed, I still ponder the comments viewers have made on the varying levels of realism in the works.  Some really liked the literalness of most of the images.   Others favored the more symbolic representation of the remainder.  Still others offered that they knew of painters who became much more successful after they'd gone to complete abstraction.

I could spend a bit of time positing the profiles of those who preferred one over the other, even though the feedback I got "skewed" toward the "city folks like the looser stuff" angle.  I also get the sense that those urban dwellers tend to favor the energy and "freedom" of loose, gestural imagery because it enhances a balance of nature and culture that we all need.  As a kind of non-linear information held in a series of linear containers from frame to room to building to street grid, etc., the painting becomes an object through which they can reflect on states of their humanity.  I suppose.

Realist painting is viewed as being primarily about craft, discipline and hard work, as well as the dewey sentiment that those qualities are nearly obsolete in the current ethos.  How well can you duplicate reality, or its photographic equivalent?  And why would you feel the need to?  Even for the cold, hard-edged photo-realism of guys like  Richard Estes or Robert Cottingham, once you've gotten the point of view digested, it still boils down to the "jeepers!" factor of how they did it.  Really well, it turns out, but still I find myself looking at works like that not for how tight and disciplined it is, but for the various inconsistencies in the brushwork, the "mistakes" that make it human.  That's a hell of a way to appreciate something that's supposed to evoke "reality".

And plein air painting, god bless it, has the worst image of all.  The realm of beret-topped retirees working their meepy impressionism on any even remotely scenic rural highway or cityscape, it is probably the most romantic ideal of the artistic lifestyle.  Certainly less seedy than rendering naked women in a Parisian studio, and more productive than the existential loftspace ennui of a beatnik demimonde.

Sonoma County, for better or worse, inspires virtually everyone who lives here (and many who don't) to render its seductive charms.  I certainly can't blame them.  To be honest, I don't trust anyone who isn't inspired by such astounding, painterly beauty to not want to "capture" it somehow.  And there are thousands of them, diligently creating souvenirs.

Which brings me to what I'm doing.

Put most simply, my desire is to convey content without the distraction of technique.  Increasingly, that content regards the sensual nature of water, what that triggers in our memory, and what our reaction to that is in a physical sense.   Desire at the molecular level.

For me now, this requires a recognizable representation of the scene, but not an infatuation with obsessive precision or clarity.  Many people refer to it as "knowing when to stop".   This nicely coincides with my current level of, ahem, technical competence, which one could charitably describe as plein air vernacular.  What distinction there might be lies in my process.  I don't paint in the field.  Plus, I don't look good in a beret.  I'm using a combination of photographs, both mine and others, recollection, and personal archetypes to determine what is produced.

At the time I began this new direction, some six or seven years ago, I was living in San Francisco, where realistic landscape paintings are somewhat rare.  This made for a nice pretense regarding the "uniqueness" of where I wanted to go.   Upon moving to Sonoma County, this conceit was rendered thankfully useless, and I could move forward, freed from the whispers of strategy.

For the time being , the works are still available online through Far West.

And I keep painting what's next.