Landscapes: Yellowstone and Federal Blvd

Welcome to the landscape department of this exhibition. I wouldn’t normally separate landscapes from my other subjects, because I don’t think of them any differently than the other subjects. The main thing I care about in all of my painting is harmony and beauty and dramatic light and exaggeration of elements.

Exaggeration toward a heightened reality that’s more interesting than our usual day to day experience. The smaller paintings were done on location. Here’s a painting of a hot spring in Yellowstone National Park. I stood there and painted it, and the clouds were going in and out. I was just completely stunned by the color, which is almost unnatural blue.

And then I have seen it in other places, in cold water too, and I don’t know what exactly is causing it, if it’s a combination of algae, or if it’s minerals, whatever it is, but it’s really stunningly beautiful to look at. The painting just below it is a painting of a gas station on Federal Boulevard. Part of the reason I love to paint on location, and part of the reason that I like to keep the paintings rather than sell them is they’re a diary of my life.

And when I was painting that, you could see the gas stations and the stationary things hold still, and even a parked car holds still, and the other cars were whizzing by. And so I painted them as a blur, because that was the best I could do, given the fact that they were just, you know, moving at high speed.

The way it’s a diary of my life, is that guys would come up and talk to me, and where I was painting was right in front of this kind of watering hole type liquor store, real seedy. The guys that would stagger in and out of it loved the fact that I was painting there, and they’d just pat me on the back, and guys wanted to take selfies with me.

I mean, after all, even the poorest among us have cell phones now, and like to do selfies, and we did double selfies together, and it made me so happy that people enjoy art like that, and you know, they know me from anybody, and to engage people like that is really a lot of fun for me. And doing a subject that, I mean, a lot of artists have actually taken on these urban scenes, and urban decay, and urban prosperity, and everything like that.

I’m right in there with them. There’s nothing original about it. It’s something that looked good to me, and I’d paint it again.