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painting, figurative, woman, bird, cage

​I am a figurative oil painter and cannot imagine a painting without a figure in it. However the figure to my mind must occupy or be part of a space or an environment. I rarely paint the figure as portrait. The completed painting needs to be a short story or part of a story in which something imminent is about to happen or has happened. It is this sense of unpredictability that I try to capture with all of my works. I use props and unusual environments to set the stage and set the figure at odds within this space. The final summary of the contents of the painting is up to the viewer.

“We were all so young. We were still our best selves.” Ann Patchett, The Dutch House


I noted this many years ago as I was working on an early collection of lake paintings.
When my daughters were young they spent many summers at Camp Wabikon on Lake Temagami in the heart of Ontario’s wilderness. They would come home refreshed and recovered from the stress of the school year, full of stories and adventures and a slew of new friends after their time in the forest and on the lake. I call it The Nature Cure.
I believe they grew into a renewed understanding of themselves and their place amongst the interconnectedness of all living things while they were living in a cabin, swimming in the early morning water and canoe-tripping the lake.
Those images and the feelings of that time have been the engine of my practice as a way to keep the idea of the summer alive in my imagination.

​Overture is a series of mixed-media landscapes and floral images exploring transformation, mystery, and the changing character of the natural world. Towering clouds, luminous water lilies, and white peonies set against deep darkness become different expressions of related ideas: beauty and vulnerability, growth and decay, what is revealed and what remains hidden. The works are based on recognizable places and forms, while also suggesting the immense forces of weather, water, light, and time.

 

The series is rooted in the rural landscapes of my childhood and connected to the sublime tradition of nineteenth-century landscape painting, in which light, weather, water, and sky could inspire awe. I bring that tradition into the present through a contemporary process that combines photography with oil paint, ink, pastel, and matte mediums on birch panels. Photographic detail meets visible brushwork, drips, and splatters, creating a tension between what has been documented and what has been transformed.

 

The title Overture suggests the opening of a larger experience. These works invite viewers into a world of shifting light, dark water, gathering clouds, and fading flowers - a world shaped by beauty, uncertainty, and continual change. 

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