Why I only paint outside.

Snow &  Dark

This is from McCart Rd. last May and I'm just illustrating this post. It shows a line I scratched into the dirt that reminds me of where to stand. It may or may not be relevant.

















   
     Nature has pattern, it has harmony, nature is alive and has a soul.  That's what I want, I can't make this shit up, I need to be there to see and feel it.  Art is a lie, it starts with the rectangle, and creates an illusion it's not nature it's something else.

    My experience of looking is my experience of noticing, and I need this experience first before I can paint it. When I'm engage in this process I don't see "it" all at once, I see it over time, maybe I see the "whole" first, maybe not, maybe nature reveals itself in a sequence I have no control over.

    Like groundhogs day, each new start,  is to face the blank canvas and look for the rhythms and harmonies that make this time and this place what it is. With my mind focused (right?) and my pallet the same, I keep as many things constant as I can, so the time and place can be the variable.  In general it's about relative value, arrangement of form: recording what I see.

     Working from nature is an experience in itself, from the preparation to the journey, the finding and  the focus: the return. It's a performance, an event, only no one sees it (except you, my dear reader). In this way I create a construct for myself, it has less to do with "art" and more with practice and routine, the warp  to the weft of my life.

     The painting I bring home is a record of what happened. Some say all that matters is the paint on the canvas, no matter how it got there.  But without life behind the paint what is there? where is the story, the narrative? Life is all those moments in between all those other moments, each one, marked in time, and it's all I got.

 
#300 McCart Rd.

5-18-14

11 x 14