… I get bored really easily, so a new set of shapes, a different kind of space, different palette-all those things heighten your awareness of these places and bring something new to the work. … What’s been great about retirement is now I can … get to places a little further away. I retired from my full-time teaching job, now I have more time. In the last couple of years, I understand you’ve gone a little further afield. … It would feel very artificial to make those decisions about stylization and exaggeration without having felt it from the experience of being in the place. And obviously there’s a certain amount of stylistic exaggeration … juxtapositions, scale shifts, that kind of thing, but all that is my intuitive response to being in nature. It’s really important to me to make those peaks that are in my paintings recognizable to the people who spend time there. It’s about … those hikes where you see the minute things … right by your feet, and then the vast, deep space as well. It’s about being in this place and living in this place and seeing the cycle of the seasons. There’s something that is just so magical about the Sierra Nevada, and I think I could never be a landscape painter who uses photographs, because it’s not about that. It’s about the flora, the fauna, the quality of the air. And you know this from growing up here, the Sierra Nevada has a unique feel. How much of that do you think comes out of now painting on-site, outside, for a long period of time? Then I crossed the country and saw once you get past Chicago how the world just explodes, and the drama and the scale of the West is pretty amazing.Ī lot of people get a real sense of place out of your work. So off to NYC I went and lived in a 5 th floor walk-up on the Lower East Side in the ’80s and started doing these fantasy landscape paintings. But I wanted to get to the city because my professors told me, “If you’re going to be an artist, you have to go to NYC.” And of course, I was young and itching to have experiences that were different. … So growing up in a small town, nature is what you’re aware of, and it’s very much a part of where I come from. I think it’s important to know that I grew up in a tiny little agricultural community in upstate New York, and my grandparents were farmers on both sides of my family. So, were there any experiences that got you moving out here, toward the West, and painting outside? I remember you telling me the story of being in your New York City studio, painting landscapes, and thinking “Why am I living in the city and painting these ?” “Among the Rabbitbrush and Sage,” oil on linen
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