Poetic Landscape

“Nature is there for all of us to mold as we will, according to the wealth that lies within ourselves. There is a time to dream, a time to walk slowly, a time to be still,

and a time to create. None should have to be justified.”

~ Elizabeth Mowry

Poetic Landscape

What many painters and poets have in common is an excruciating sensitivity to their surroundings. Nature takes a deep hold on them and the intensity of that relationship has much to do with the vision that ultimately inspires the painted images and the poems.

Poetic landscape has to do with mood, ideas, and spatial nuances, all ethereal as opposed to realistic. It gets beyond the craft into the tenuous space where intellect and spirit direct the technique. The poetic landscape becomes a gentle reminder of the importance of tranquility by declaring the beauty or tragedy of a singular idea. It always falls just short of closure thereby creating space for the memories or yearnings of the viewer. So while the artist visually describes the scene, it is the viewer who completes the script with what is personally meaningful. Much of poetic landscape is introspective. Its strength emerges from what is left unexpressed, making space for the silenced past of the viewer to find a voice. Poetry has been described as the expression of universal truth. Nature, too, is universal because it can be experienced by everyone. “Poetic” landscape embraces the most common natural elements familiar to all people.

The paintings that have evolved in my recent work are about closure as a gentle and mature coming together

of the fragments of our youthful discovery and exuberance; then later of our struggles to achieve, to acquire, and to feel power and then willingly let it go with grace and dignity. We begin to subtract priorities and lean into only the essential, a change brought about over time by reflection in mature humans, and finally, by necessity, in the elderly. Other recent work is about mortality but without sadness; spirituality without the noisy pursuit of it; and a gentle, overall joy, through painting, from the exploration of beauty, sometimes tragedy, and silence separately and together. I am intrigued by the expressive correlations between nature and every human emotion and stage of growth. At the same time, I continue to wonder where or when in life we cross over that tenuous edge between striving, pushing ahead, fighting wars and needing always to win the race or the prize, to where it is simply enough to create in cloistered silence some small painted memory of significant joy.

Valedictory, Pastel 5” x 11”