About Landscapes and Animals

It all begins in nature and it’ll end in nature, whether it’s an empire or a civilization, one person or a culture. Nature is so much more than the singular dimension perceived by our senses, which is amazing but not everything. The dimensions of nature are multitudinous, hardly dimensions at all. More like stories, or a chorus. Or like a process, a long journey, from place to place, and the journey becomes our home, the seasons of the garden, to which we’ll always return.

In this age of oil there is a hubris that we can do better than nature. Such has become the catechism in the church of science and technology wedded to capitalism. In the long term we will return to sunlight, to wind and photosynthesis. So we climb this seemingly endless stairway trying hard to transcend nature, but in the end the stairway becomes a rainstorm, a rainbow, or a single blade of grass. So, by painting a single blade of grass I can celebrate this crazy world, this amazing ant hill of activity: We are nature.

A single blade of grass is a landscape. To paint an ant hill is to paint a scene. To paint from our visions, spiritual experiences, or to paint just the metaphorical junkyard of all the civilizations that have come before, is to be a plein air artist of our universal inscape. And there’s so much more to paint. Essentially all of my artworks are landscapes.

Perhaps ironically I have always struggled to paint a landscape as perceived by my eyes: e.g. when a forest scene became a totem forest. Someday perhaps I’ll paint a single blade of grass. In this gallery are a few paintings that are basically landscapes, sometimes with animals, where few if any of the artifacts of our lives make an appearance.