I admit it. I am a sucker for Landscape paintings. Although most of my free time, it seems, I find myself inside waiting for this or that or sitting in a boring meeting with thoughts escaping to one of these pastoral images. I have several colleagues and friends (those I can talk to about art and more cerebral topics) who are enamored with modern art. I appreciate modern art but to me they affect me like a color study affects me; it is interesting and somehow I come away smarter but it doesn't make a connection to my heart. Not like a landscape or a figure study of a friend, my children or my wife- it connects to my heart- brings back incredible feelings to the time I first laid paint to paper- it captures for me a moment in time and the feelings I felt when I was carried away to that unforgettable place where time stops and all I can hear is the beating of my heart and that which is in front of me.
This scene which is becoming more and more rare in our backyard. More and more faceless and soulless homes are filling in around us and they seem not only more of them but incomprehensibly larger. I think minimalists like D. Price go a little too far in living so simply that they erase themselves from existence. But I would rather be a neighbor to a million D. Price's out there than the 6,000 sf McMansions that are sprouting up everywhere around us- being purchased by those who really can't afford it and who eventually lose it to bankruptcy. I think the Joneses should be locked up.
There probably only 4 colors used in this sketch but they convey what I saw and felt. My pallete of paints are increasing in the earth tones and decreasing on the primaries.
Technorati Tags: Journal, Sketch, Watercolor
