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

Branches

I did a series of paintings looking upwards into tree canopies during winter. the trees were bare of leaves here on the east coast and the branches cut the sky into beautiful shapes like a stained glass window.

Blythewold old oak panorama

Blythewold beach canopy

Blythewold Larch

Blythewold rock beach

This painting shows some of the wonderful and colorful complexity that has grown on the rocks and debris at the water's edge along the naragansett bay here in Rhode Island.  Blythewold is a marvelous old mansion and grounds that are open to the public and this view was found along their beach.  It is a place full of the cries of gulls and the rushing shushing noise of the constant wave lapping.
The shapes are so rich.  Click on the image and then zoom in on the big rock to see abstracts just jump off the page.

Blythewold Rock beach

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