Wheat Field, Summer Peak

Island, Gore's Landing

This is an area so rich in possibilities....Gore's Landing is 10 minutes from me...and minutes in any direction provide fascination that calls out to be recorded in some way. This makes it difficult to travel in my time off....there is too much to do right where I am.

10" x 8" acrylic collage painting on paper, listed on Etsy.

Dusk, After the Rain

In a number of images I wanted to get a certain brooding quality from the trees and approaching darkness. In some works also, I want the composition to be very simplified......just this thing...and not a relationship of a whole lot of things. 7.5" x 7.5" acrylic collage painting on paper, listed on Etsy.

July 11

8" x 10" acrylic collage painting on masonite panel, varnished, listed on Etsy.

July 23

8.5" x 7.5" acrylic collage painting on paper, listed on Etsy.

July Wheat

This wheatfield is much lighter and more yellow now....the wheat is maturing quickly and summer is shifting to another stage. 8" x 7.25" acrylic collage painting on paper, listed on Etsy.

Gore's Landing

Gore's Landing is a lovely village on the South shore of Rice Lake....this island is close to the shore and appears to have cottages or homes. There are a number of such islands.....a beautiful early Saturday morning in July.

Acrylic collage painting on paper, 9 x 7.25 inches, listed on Etsy.

Saturday Cloud

10.5 x 10 inch, acrylic collage on paper, listed on Etsy...a very pleasant July Saturday morning, blue skies with dramatic clouds floating through the whole day.

Home Lane

9" x 8" acrylic collage painting on paper, listed on Etsy. The summer has been cool so far, and I hear many complaining, but the weather seems wonderful to me....perfect for painting and working, plenty of both rain and sunlight, growth very healthy and still holding a beautiful range of greens, with often surprising configurations of clouds animating the skies.

Plain and Simple

Acrylic collage painting on paper, 9.5 x 9 inches, listed on Etsy. A perfect summer day. Very often the first decision or two set the tone for everything else. The intense blue was the first piece placed....I was thinking of the clear coolness of this summer.

High Sky

From July 7th, acrylic on gessoed single ply matteboard, 9.75" x 8.5", listed on Etsy.

Tree Farm

...a shady corner of an abandoned tree farm on a Sunday morning...the place was very well run at one point but is looking derelict recently. Much time was spent on the collage stage of this work...happily cutting and gluing little pieces...in a way akin to building something, like nailing a sculpture together. There is a certain realism to the light and atmosphere that I was pleased with. 7.5 x 9.5 inch acrylic collage painting on paper, listed on Etsy.

Saturday Morning

This is the image referred to in an earlier post....the sky was repainted 3 times and it still failed to satisfy...something was too predictable or too busy or too methodical or too conscientious. This was the stage it was left at. 8" x 10" acrylic on masonite, listed on Etsy.

July Blue

Fast clouds moving in over the tree tops...painted on July 9th, acrylic on gessoed masonite panel, 8" x 10", listed on Etsy.

High Summer

Two paintings from a bit ago that will not be listed on my Etsy site.....most everything I do WILL be on the Etsy page but I wanted to put these here so they won't be gone forever. "High Summer" and "July Sky".

Passing Storm

Evening clouds....the storm had just passed. Acrylic on gessoed masonite panel, 8" x 10".

There is no particular way to direct the work other than to say "I would like to see something like....." This was perhaps the 4th in a short series of cloud paintings. I don't know how to paint them when I start, and once the 5th one starts to look too much like the first, it is time to juggle the general formula again. A very common concern in all the work is to do something 'natural'...and what is natural may not be that obvious. I just finished a painting for example, in which I painted the clouds 3 times over, only to wipe out 3/4 of the work. I then scribbled over the wet paint and with 3 quick brush strokes re-entered some passages which were previously much too overworked or perhaps too predictable.......this solution was much less of a copy, yet more natural and life-like. At least that's how it looks at the moment....perhaps tomorrow it will look different again.....nailing any of this stuff firmly down seems next to impossible.

Fast Sky, July 9

8" x 10" acrylic on gessoed masonite panel. Listed on Etsy. I painted 5 of these cloud works in a row, over a number of days, but today's painting was a collage painting, treated in a different way again...so this series may or may not continue. Storms came and went today, and the temperature has cooled down again. The skies change dramatically from minute to minute.

Sky July 10th

In the last few days I've been painting on gessoed masonite panels, 8" x 10". The skies have been very active but there have been no violent or dangerous storms....crossing fingers.

Big Blue

9" x 9.5", acrylic on gessoed single-ply matte board, completed on June 30th, 2009, 11:00 a.m., listed on Etsy.

Sky Paintings

This from a while ago, and part of a series of paintings dealing only with sky....sometimes with just a hint of the earth below. A number have been completed so far with more to follow. 9 inches square, completed on heavy, acid-free, gessoed artist's paper, soon to be listed on Etsy.
SOLD

Avenue

...a largely abandoned, previously government run, tree growing facility....now only one building on this large tract of land is used as an auction building....the rest is going derelict.....a very ill-considered government cutback. Waiting for an auction on an early Sunday morning......the play of light very pronounced through this avenue of trees.

Acrylic collage painting, now listed on Etsy.

Time Passing

"What astonished me most, I think, was the simple fact that he had a body. Until I saw him lying there in bed, I'm not sure that I ever fully believed in him. Not as an authentic person, at any rate, not in the way I believed in Alma or myself, not in the way I believed in Helen or even Chateaubriand. It stunned me to acknowledge that Hector had hands and eyes, fingernails and shoulders, a neck and a left ear -- that he was tangible, that he wasn't an imaginary being. He had been inside my head for so long, it seemed doubtful that he could exist anywhere else.

The bony, liver-spotted hands; the gnarled fingers and thick, protruding veins; the collapsed flesh under his chin; the half-open mouth. He was lying on his back with his arms out over the covers when I entered the room, awake but still, looking up at the ceiling in a kind of trance. When he turned in my direction, however, I saw that his eyes were Hector's eyes. Furrowed cheeks, grooved forehead, wattled throat, tufted white hair --and yet I recognized the face as Hector's face. It had been sixty years since he'd worn the mustache and the white suit, but he hadn't altogether vanished. He'd grown old, he'd grown infinitely old, but a part of him was still there.

Zimmer, he said. Sit down here beside me, Zimmer, and turn off the light.

His voice was weak and clogged with phlegm, a soft rumbling of sighs and demi-articulations, but it was loud enough for me to make out what he said. The r at the end of my name had a slight roll to it, and as I reached over and turned off the lamp at the bedside table, I wondered if it wouldn't be easier for him if we continued on Spanish. After the light was off, however, I saw that a second lamp was on in the far corner of the room -- a standing lamp with a broad vellum shade -- and that a woman was sitting in the chair beside the lamp. She stood up the moment I glanced over at her, and I must have jumped a little when she did that -- not only because I was startled, but because she was tiny, as tiny as the man who had opened the door downstairs. Neither one of them could have been more than four feet tall. I thought I heard Hector laugh behind me (a faint wheeze, the merest whisper of a laugh), and then the woman nodded at me in silence and walked out of the room.

Who was that? I said.

Don't be alarmed, Hector said. Her name is Conchita. She is part of the family.

I didn't see her, that's all. It surprised me.

Her brother Juan lives here, too. They are little people. Strange little people who cannot talk. We depend on them.

Do you want me to turn off the other light?

No, this is good. Not so hard on the eyes. I am content.

I sat down on the chair beside the bed and leaned forward, trying to position myself as close to his mouth as possible. The light from the other side of the room was no stronger than the light of a candle, but the illumination was sufficient for me to see Hector's face, to look into his eyes. A pale glow hovered over the bed, a yellowish air mixed with the shadows and dark.

It is always too soon, Hector said, but I am not afraid. A man like me has to be crushed. Thank you for being here, Zimmer. I did not expect you to come.

Alma was very convincing. You should have sent her to me a long time ago.

You shook up my bones, sir. At first, I could not accept what you did. Now I think I am glad.

I didn't do anything.

You wrote a book. Again and again, I have read that book, and again and again I have asked myself: why did he choose me? What was your purpose, Zimmer?

You made me laugh. That was all it ever was. You cracked open something inside me, and after that you became my excuse to go on living.

Your book does not say that. It does honor to my old work with the mustache, but you do not talk about yourself.

I'm not in the habit of talking about myself. It makes me uncomfortable.

Alma has mentioned great sorrows, unspeakable pain. If I have helped you to bear that pain, it is perhaps the greatest good I have done.

I wanted to be dead. After listening to what Alma told me this afternoon, I gather you've been to that place yourself.

Alma was right to tell you those things. I am a ridiculous man. God has played many jokes on me, and the more you know about them, the better you will understand my films. I look forward to hearing what you say about them, Zimmer. Your opinion is very important to me.

I know nothing about films.

But you study the works of others. I have read those books, too. Your translations, your writings on the poets. It is no accident that you have spent years on the question of Rimbaud. You understand what it means to turn your back on something. I admire a man who can think like that. It makes your opinion important to me.

You've managed without anyone's opinion until now. Why this sudden need to know what others think?

Because I am not alone. Others live here, too, and I must not think only of myself.

From what I've been told, you and your wife have always worked together.

Yes, that is true. But there is Alma to consider as well.

The biography?

Yes, the book she is writing. After her mother's death, I understood that I owed her that. Alma has so little, and it seemed worth it to abandon some of my ideas about myself in order to give her a chance at life. I have begun to act like a father. It is not the worst thing that could have happened to me.

I thought Charlie Grund was her father.

He was. But I am her father, too. Alma is the child of this place. If she can turn my life into a book, then perhaps things will begin to go well for her. If nothing else, it is an interesting story. A stupid story, perhaps, but not without its interesting moments.

You're saying that you don't care about yourself anymore, that you've given up.

I have never cared about myself. Why should it bother me to turn myself into an example for others? Perhaps it will make them laugh. That would be a good outcome -- to make people laugh again. You laughed, Zimmer. Perhaps others will begin to laugh with you.

We were just warming up, just beginning to get into the swing of the conversation, but before I could think of a response to Hector's last comment, Frieda walked into the room and touched me on the shoulder.

I think we should let him rest now, she said. You can go on talking in the morning.

It was demoralizing to be cut off like that, but I wasn't in the position to object. Frieda had given me less than five minutes with him, and already he had won me over, already he had made me like him more than I would have thought possible. If a dying man could exert that power, I remarked to myself, imagine what he must have been like at full strength.

I know that he said something to me before I left the room, but I can't remember what it was. Something simple and polite, but the precise words escape me now. To be continued, I think it was, or else Until tomorrow, Zimmer, a banal phrase that signified nothing of any great importance -- except, perhaps, that he still believed he had a future, however short that future might have been. As I stood up from the chair, he reached out and grabbed my arm. That I do remember. I remember the cold, clawlike feel of his hand, and I remember thinking to myself: this is happening. Hector Mann is alive, and his hand is touching me now. Then I remember telling myself to remember what that hand felt like. If he didn't live until morning, it would be the only proof that I had seen him alive."

The Book of Illusions, Paul Auster

Ski Hill

...a June morning.....the ski slopes in green.

4" x 4" acrylic collage painting on paper, external paper size 5" x 5", now listed on Etsy.

Cloud Bank

...a late spring sky. Recently I've been thinking about doing a number of works only with sky...no land beneath at all, or perhaps only the tiniest hint of land. The English painter John Constable made reference to 'going skying'.....he made some wonderful cloud images right on location. Summer days are coming, which means more time to paint.

5" x 5" acrylic collage painting on paper, external paper size 6" x 6", now listed on Etsy.

Spring Line

A 7" x 9" acrylic painting on gessoed heavy acid-free artist's paper. The spring foliage was just coming out on this long, thin line bordering a field.....bold clouds threatening nothing.....Saturday morning.

There should be something that I know about how the picture will proceed, and there should be a fair bit that I do NOT know. One thing that I am conscious of in the last few paintings is that I'm dragging the paint across in a slightly different way with my largest brush....it feels a bit like petting the cat against the grain....but the cat doesn't seem to mind....seems to lend a slightly different expression to the paint here.

Trio

...just at the point when new foliage emerges.....3 tree groupings very far in the distance....

4" x 4" acrylic collage painting on acid-free matteboard, external card size 5" x 5", now listed on Etsy.
SOLD

Home Lane

From May 18th....I was holding on to these dear days closely. A perfect spring day, warm and sunlit....

5" x 5" collage painting on white acid-free matteboard, external card size 6" x 6", just listed on Etsy

Spring Sky,

The daily visit to the greenest field yielded this a while ago. At dusk I can often see lights set in the distant blue, a sign that that along highway 28, a number of miles north, more development is steadily enroaching.

5" x 5" acrylic collage painting on acid-free matte board, external card size 6" x 6", listed on Etsy today.

Into Garden Hill

A late spring piece from a week or so ago...descending into the village crossroads just south of me.

Acrylic collage painting on paper, 4" x 4", external paper size 5" x 5", listed on Etsy today.
SOLD

A Simple Act

The school year is ending and we are busy making great collages right to the end. Other classes are painting so of course all sorts of paint is left over. At day's end I can easily spend an extra hour in the studio just mixing and spreading paint onto papers....and it is a completely pleasing process. The point is just to use the colour and mix every conceivable variety and viscosity of paint from fully opaque to very transparent. When all the final work is done in the school studio before dismissing for holidays, I will look through this left over collection and find the most appealing things to incorporate into my summer collage paintings at home. It is odd but sometimes the colours produced at school end up being very different from the ones made at home. It'll be hard keeping the boxes and boxes of colour over summer and into the new academic year because the studio fills up with so much material. It has to go just so we can fill it up again.....but the colours always look wonderful to me. One day there might have been a lot of leftover purples, another day blues....and unpremeditated collections get made...so many unexpected combinations possible....so many great paintings just quietly hiding in the tangle of paper.

Mid May

This made in Mid May, the 15th. Today is extremely cold, close to freezing, and I wore my winter hat while walking, but visually the day is beautiful. Two more little square paintings made today. It is a busy time of year, and it was good to produce something today after a few days gap.

5" x 5" acrylic collage painting on heavy, archival paper, 6" x 6" external paper size, listed on Etsy today.

Evening Trail

I've been meaning to paint sections of this trail for years....part of a snowmobile trail in winter, used by dirt bikes and ATVs in the summer, but almost always sure to be quiet and unused. Quite high up here....if you were to look over the edge on the left, the side road would be 15 feet below....into the deep coniferous forest on the right....fairly late into the evening...still light, but you could feel night coming.

4" x 4" acrylic collage painting on acid-free matte board, external card size 5" x 5", now listed on Etsy.

Near Home

A while ago now....just as the leaves where coming out....returning home and looking down the long, protected lane. The little white rectangle is my neighbor's mailbox....a few minutes walk to my place.

Acrylic collage painting on paper, 4" x 4", external paper size 5" x 5", now listed on Etsy.

Roadside, May 2

For two days in a row I walked by this location and there was something about the field above and the cut of the road embankment that was pleasing. The top field was just greening up and the air was cool. It was interesting that my response was just as strong the second day of seeing this....a signal that there was something there I should paint. This little format is suitable to these sorts of small sensations. On a bigger size and different format, I wouldn't have painted this.....every decision affects something else.

4" x 4" acrylic collage painting on paper, external paper size 5" x 5", just listed on Etsy.

Pilgrimage Field

There are a number of directions I walk in, and no close paths get neglected, but there are favourite places that are missed if not seen regularly. This field changes often...the farmer is very attentive to the health of the soil and to his crop. I often see him in passing as he comes to or leaves this area. There is a path just at the left here that would allow me to encircle the field but signs are posted and I don't wish to be a nuisance. Painted a while ago....the field is quite green now with a very slow growing crop that is perhaps there just to hold the soil and add nutrients....to be plowed under a bit later.

5" x 5" acrylic collage painting on white, acid-free matte board, external card size 6" x 6", soon to be listed on Etsy.
SOLD

How Easy Is It Anyway?...How Hard Can It Be?

Matisse started as a painter who was very much tied to the things he saw, but steadily he moved to the point where he wanted much more than that. Colour and all the elements of art needed to be distanced from the 'simpler' act of seeing, while somehow still grounded in 'experienced' reality. It's this duality that still gives such strength to his work. And if we think that this was an easy victory, and not really much of a step, fairly familiar terrain already explored previously by Gauguin and Cezanne just to name two who were at least in the same ballpark, we should think again.

I am mightily surprised by the actual record because the Fauve works produced in Collioure in 1905, seem, on the face of it, such a joyous release. But not everything is as easy as it might at first seem.

" More than forty years later, Georges Duthuit described the state in which his father-in-law [Matisse] approached the act of painting, a tension so extreme that those closest to him risked being sucked in with him to the verge of breakdown or vertigo. "The obvious forebodings experienced by the painter-who is at the same time so prudent, and so orderly that people call him 'the Doctor'---made him tremble. During the few years when he was able to endure this vision, Matisse spent whole nights without sleep, nights of desperation and panic." From now on Matisse would never again be free from the insomnia that had first attacked him on Belle-Ile. Amelie helped him through the interminable nights by reading to him, sometimes until dawn. The novel Matisse remembered reading in 1905 was Alexander Kuprine's Yama, an account of life in a provincial Russian brothel which deeply disturbed him. In fact, he could not have read this particular book (which was not published in French until 1923): it was a freak of Matisse's imagination that transposed Kuprine's powerful images of brutality and exploitation in a nocturnal underworld back to the summer at Collioure, when the stable, familiar daytime appearance of normality seemed to be blown apart before our eyes.

It is not easy to understand today how paintings of light and colour, mediated through scenes of simple seaside domesticity----a view of fishing boats above pots of scarlet geraniums on the studio windowsill, Amelie wrapped in a towel or seated barefoot on the rocks----could have seemed at the time, both to their perpetrator and to his public, an assault that threatened to undermine civilization as they knew it. But Matisse was not simply discarding perspective, abolishing shadows, repudiating the academic distinction between line and colour. He was attempting to overturn a way of seeing evolved and accepted by the Western world for centuries, going back to painters like Michelangelo and Leonardo, and before them to the Greek and Roman masters of antiquity. He was substituting for their illusion of objectivity a conscious subjectivity, a twentieth-century art that would draw its validity essentially from the painter's own visual and emotional responses. "

Hilary Spurling, The Unknown Matisse, Volume 1, Penguin, 1998

Ready Field

5" x 5" acrylic collage painting on acid-free white matte board, now listed on Etsy.

Wild Mustard

Painted yesterday...and I ran out of time so only one image was made yesterday. Something about the interaction of colours and viewing the scene from afar was appealing. The strong yellow of the wayward mustard...leftovers from last year or wild seed, combined with the fresh green and the heavy, somewhat overcast sky, spoke of a special quality of spring that seems to move so quickly. It was very pleasant making this. In my favourite pieces there is usually a fine balance between abstraction and a certain kind of realism. I like to be able to feel myself in the picture...to walk on the grass...to breath the air. It's something I aim for but it doesn't always happen even if the picture might have other redeeming qualities. The ease of decision making is important to me. I agonize over too much and I don't want to agonize over pictures.....when the flow from decision to decision happens almost automatically the experience of picture making becomes more memorable and self-sustaining.

5" x 5" acrylic collage painting on acid-free matte board, external card size, 6" x 6", now listed in my Etsy shop.
SOLD

Home

Home...coming home from walks this is what I've been seeing the last few days just before entering the drive. These things start not so much as pictures, but as sensations. I noticed "oh...it's so nice and fresh and green just here"....something is felt first and then the picture is constructed. When I started doing the 4" squares I noticed the format is really conducive to this sort of thinking. Here I went to a slightly bigger square at 5". There will likely be many more of this size since 4 more have already been made...the first was done yesterday.

5" x 5" acrylic collage painting on paper, external paper size 6" x 6", now listed in my Etsy shop.

Tracking Spring

Painted on April 25th....the crest of a hill with a bit of scrub bush just starting to feel the pull of spring....the ground greening up a touch. There is a period from about the start of March to the end of June when I track the days carefully for changes....it's a dramatic and favourite time.

4" x 4" acrylic collage painting on paper, external paper size 5" x 5", now listed in my Etsy shop.

Etsy Treasury

Click on the title to see VickiDianeDesigns selection of Etsy dudes....apparently there is a shortage of man creatures over there. I happen to be a man creature...I qualify! Thank you, Vicki.

April Sky

Only a while ago in April, my closest field looked like this, and now it is a very lush green. I would like to keep up with painting daily changes in the landscape but that is never possible. Suffice to know that nature does not really repeat and fascinating and endless surprises are available to anyone who simply looks.

4" x 4" acrylic collage painting on paper, external paper size 5" x 5", now listed on Etsy.

Seedlings, 2 Inches Tall

Was it only 4 or 5 days ago that I saw the tractor seeding this field? The seedlings are about 2 inches tall now. Such an image of hope.....a seeded field in spring, and thankfully there are still people who make a life putting seeds in the ground. I seem to visit this field almost every day and have painted it from various angles perhaps well over 20 times.

Low Clouds

The field is higher than me here....I'm on the road just below.....the clouds seemed to hang so low. I liked how the field turned out....the scale of the marks suggested a proper recession into distance. There is always this concern with distance....memories of Saskatchewan fields slipping miles back.

4" x 4" acrylic collage painting, external paper size 5" x 5", now listed on Etsy.

Matisse, On Originality

Matisse became very interested in Maupassant's ideas on artistic originality, which grew out of lessons the writer learned as a young man from Gustave Flaubert.

"What you have to do is look at what you wish to express long enough and with enough attention to discover an aspect of it that has never been seen or described by anyone before. There is something unexplored in everything, because we have grown used to letting our eyes be conditioned by the memory of what others have thought before us about whatever we are looking at....To describe a blazing fire and a tree on a plain, we must stay put in front of that fire and that tree until for us they no longer resemble any other tree or any other fire. That is the way in which you will become original."

There are problems caused by not looking carefully enough at those who came before you, of being ignorant of the discipline (95% of the enterprise is learned....there is no need to even attempt reinventing the wheel every time) and then there are problems caused by looking so closely at examples that you cannot see past what has already been done.

-The Unknown Matisse, Hilary Spurling, book 1 in her 2 part biography of Matisse.

401 Embankment, Port Hope

Driving into Port Hope and passing the County Road 10 401 Entrance....this embankment made a strong impression...I turned my car around and parked for a bit just to get the right view. It's a man-made hill but I liked the slope of it and the smattering of young growth up the incline....one of my favourites of these small pieces.

4" x 4" acrylic collage painting, external paper size 5" x 5", now listed on Etsy.

White House, May 2

The last of 3 little images made yesterday...completed from a motif noticed while doing the garage sale rounds in the morning. This tiny white spec of a house seemed so fresh in the midst of the new greens.....still the pinks in the background because foliage is just starting for deciduous trees.....also shot outside against my favourite flower, the tulip, which sadly seems to last only a few days now because cool spring days can turn summer hot in the snap of a finger.

Every picture requires tension of some sort....dark and light, bright and greyed colors, large and small, very loose and more controlled......all of these are noticeable here and consciously included in the painting process. As well, while every inch of the surface must always be considered, not all parts of the piece should be equally worked. Some areas are singled out for more development, some for less....and this also gives a desired tension. This aspect also seems to dovetail nicely with the way vision works. As we look at the world we choose to focus upon only certain things at any one time, but we remain aware of a great deal of secondary information in the form of peripheral vision. Some of the world seems very complex, busy and detailed....and other parts remain veils of generalized information...and it all fits seamlessly together. Not a new discovery at all and present in so many ways through art history. Just one example, the sfumato of High Renaissance and Baroque times allowed the artist to spotlight attention easily onto select subjects by allowing edges of objects to fade away unnoticeably into the simplified darkness of background. More and more I do notice that this contrast of the general to the specific is necessary and desirable in a picture, and can lead to some sense of realness at least akin to what is experienced in life.

4" x 4" acrylic collage painting on paper, external paper size 5" x 5", now listed on Etsy.