Entering Paintings

Defining a sense of place in my paintings marks my place and connects me to my environment. It identifies the spaces where I live and travel. I paint variations with preference for certain coves, islands, estuaries, fragments of horizon, surfaces of water, and curves of shoreline. 

It is not just the structure of these places, but the way in which they reflect light and suggest color that interests me.

Painting these places repeatedly is the way in which I represent the continuity of my life, the way I see, and the wonder of seeing specific, familiar locations in different formats.

Painting allows me to explore varied light and perspectives of one subject. I often return to the same island as I walk along the shore, or to the same erratic boulder as I kayak. 

I revisit the landmarks of my paintings, as I would call upon friends. I set my eyes upon them once again to see if they offer new insights, and to inspect the physical place that I have reinvented in the painting. I enjoy being in my painting spaces, and relating the concrete life to the visual concept.

While taking a train from New York to New Jersey a few months ago, I caught a glimpse of a familiar large white convoluted structure, a soccer stadium that had been a part of a series of New Jersey aerial landscape paintings that I had recently completed. 

I looked out the opposite window and recognized the cluster of reflective high-rise buildings that I had painted behind the stadium. Instead of seeing small buildings below from the plane as I had painted them, I now saw them as a towering and imposing skyline reflecting the morning sun. Almost as if I had entered a storybook, I inhabited a visual space that I had painted. I felt as though I had shrunk, and had become a part of the loosely painted diagonal line on the right side of the canvas between Harrison and Newark; a smudge that had represented the railway, the light glinting off the train. I was in that smudge. I occupied that highlight.

During the same trip, while driving on the Garden State Parkway during a particularly congested time of day, I had a similar flash of recognition, and joked with my husband when he complained about the traffic, that we were simply revisiting another painting as we do when we kayak in Maine.