Recent Paintings, 2010-2012
Recent paintings from the series "Mountain Passages." Presence, present, to be present – these are all entangled for me now. The massive northern shoulder of Rainy Mountain slopes down to meet the flood plain just behind my studio. From late fall to early Spring it is a massive shadowed cloak that descends, and from Spring to Fall it is a bright green lit body. It is not present as a picture. It hovers dramatically between being just some of the furniture of the world and startlingly something else: something protean, powerful and energetic, something drawing my own presence into its circle, always shouldering against where I am, against what I see and what I feel. Then one morning I step outside the studio to see that Rainy Mountain has dissolved – the mists that live in these mountains have taken it for their own form of presence- an expression of the world making and remaking itself, a process of re-becoming, like ocean waves that rise and then refold into one another. Even in the seeming millennial immutability of this land, some aspect, some dimension, breathes. The very ineffability makes possible the expansive reality of the land around me. It is a great gift. These paintings are my witness.
Forest and Wall, 2009. 78"h. x 89"w. oil on canvas