Approaching Storm

This painting of an approaching storm is truly a representation of the creative storm that is consuming my thoughts at this time. It is one of my first paintings and my recent trip to New Mexico during "monsoon season" brought it to mind. The ranch where I lived bordered a large open basin bound by mountains on the far side. Summer storms began with incredible cloud formations that coalesced and eventually produced great thunderstorms which would move across the basin. I would sit on my portal, very like this one, and watch nature's beautiful drama as it progressed across the horizon. This year, housesitting near Santa Fe in a similar setting, I watched the storm clouds grow throughout the day and was once again overwhelmed by their power and beauty.

My New Mexico trip did not really go as planned but turned out to be much better in ways I could never have anticipated. An artist friend and mentor had talked to me about my painting the day before I left and his words intensely focused my thoughts in new amd more serious directions. I spent a lot of time traveling to places I have known and loved, visiting with old friends, looking, absorbing and thinking. There was also a reaffirmation of my connection between visual and verbal during a casual brainstorming session with two writers. All of this has brought me to the conclusion that I have to recommit myself to painting in a more deliberate way than I have done in the past. I came back with hundreds of photographs from which I will create many NM paintings, but more importantly, I began to identify the core elements that are essential to how I perceive the world around me. These are the elements that will be the formative energy in what I create.

The most powerful images for me are of rocks and clouds - the basic structures of our world and its most ephemeral manifestations. Human structures, especially churches, parallel these natural forms with a sense of foundations and spiritual yearnings. The Catholic churches of NM, built of earth or stone and reflecting the clouds in their architecture, serve as a metaphor for the human experience. Adobe structures - whether pueblos or individual homes - bring these same elements to our daily life. Finally I realized that painting fruits or vegetables or flowers (none of which have interested me before) is just another way of relating a universal process to an individual's life and growth. Making this rather obvious jump has encouraged me to expand my painting horizons to include still lives, which will give me much practice at painting directly from the object - something I cannot do with NM forms while living in Oklahoma! So I will continue to paint from photographs while also spending more time outside painting directly from nature.