Digging Deep in the Crypt

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Don't have much time today as I'm knee deep in re-organizing my studio. Had a request from one of my main art galleries to send them some images of works on paper, so I was reminiscing as I got the images together for them. I've been painting daily since 1966. That's a heck of a lot of history. Often you forget where you were. Here are a few paintings I hadn't looked at in some time that greeted me like old friends.

Above is a view of the Texas Hill Country done as an oil on paper just west of San Antonio from the early '90's. It's a dry, rolling ranching country, cut up by cattle fences everywhere. This painting is about the tightly squeezed intervals between the forms and the counter-contrasting light and dark forms. I like the way I have a mostly light painting with a band of warm-colored darks running from one side to the other as a middleground.



This is also an oil on paper of the Texas Hill Country, though this one is painted way later in the day (can't you just feel that). It uses the very long shadows of just before sunset to plunge the whole background into cool shadow. The background is like a dark trampoline to bounce the light foreground up to the front of the space.



This is an oil on paper from the late '80's. It painted from the hotel balcony where my wife and I were staying during one of her professional conferences in Louisville. That's the Ohio River with an amazing number of old bridges crossing its span. I was delighted with the view and the strange and narrow stone bridge abutments rising up out of the water like beautiful sculptures. Eakins painted similar bridges accompanying his rowers up in Philadelphia.




Lastly here's a final oil on paper from the early '80's. It's simply called Three Tree Trunks and shows the edge of the woods next to the parking lot where I used to live. It was built above an old Copper Mine near Baltimore, and the metallic soil favored short bent pines. They can be the most elegant of trees with their unexpected poses. 

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