Pine brooms

Pin ItIn a small park near my home called Hanes Park, there are several older pine trees with intensely dense growths on them called "Pine Brooms."  These growths presented such opportunity to bring out the static chaos and gestures that the more oderly trees without these sematic mutations lacked.  I am personally attracted to the beauty of asymmetry and imperfection.  I also love the oily, pitch-created kaleidoscope of colors that can be pulled out of the tessellated pine bark.  For me, they become almost jewel toned and act as wonderful moments of contrast to the colors in the broom.

Hanes pine broom #1

Hanes pine broom #2

Hanes bog in winter

Here's three digital paintings of a local small park called Hane's park shortly after a big snowfall.  I love the quality the color shapes take on with the inky water and the bluish snow clumps contrasting and breaking everything up like floating negative space.  The snow pushes these images more abstract and compresses the visual space in wonderful ways. I've been experimenting with the color of water and reflections that turn the surface into color patterns like intricate stained glass.  Again, this process exposes some very different ways of seeing the natural world.  Individual things become melded into bigger gestures and randomized patters and what used to be unified surfaces now become puzzle pieces of tone and saturated line.  Comic book artists understand much of this because of the nature of their craft but these images dissemble the shapes with nature's randomness rather than human stylization.

Hanes Bog #1

Hanes bog #2

Hanes bog #3

Cadillac Mountain rich colors

Bar Harbor is one of my favorite places on the planet.  Here's a composited and heavily painted image that uses some of the incredible stone formation from the summit.  I was intent on bringing out the furtive shapes of the moss and scrub grass and show their relationship to the marbled rocks and the graphics the shapes create when turned hard edged.  I've painted the colors to be how I felt about the place and unabashedly pulling bits and parts equally from my imagination and other photos.  This isn't traditional media so these images are about the end result.  The process is very freeing.

Cadillac Mountain colors and shapes

Here's a close up showing the wonderful abstract shapes that emerge and that I get to play with and paint into.  These rock surfaces are not just a stipling of color.  They are twisting and cropped shapes that have tremendous energy at the miniature level and mass up to create a richness that goes beyond impressionist dots.  Look at the colors that emerge as well.  I have several hundred of these paintings and after having done them as an experiment over the past few years I find they have informed the "from scratch" paintings I'm doing in a big way.

Bar Harbor rock close up