YOU TUBE VIDEO dealing with a visit to a museum and an encounter with an artists work

It has been over forty years that I have been involved in painting aspects of the natural world I inhabit and it took some time before I began to understand in some measure the reasons for it. Like many artists when they begin painting there is always the pull of influences that you admire. Shedding those influences and finding a path of your own to explore for me took some time and an even longer time for the reasons behind it to surface in a conscious way. What was odd when I started painting the land, was that I was not someone who enjoys camping and I did not consider myself a tree hugger or a naturalist, yet here I was embarking on an obsessive involvement and love affair with a subject that was to embrace all my mature career as an artist.  Over time I began to realize that the roots for it all took hold when as a young boy I was to spend some of the best times of my life each summer in a rural area of Wisconsin in a town called Fall Creek. 

Fall Creek is a town hardly on the map and is even less so today because of an interstate highway that diverted people who used to stop there on their  way to somewhere else. I was there because my great aunt Ellen and her husband Sam some years before and for reasons I do not know bought some twenty four small cabins as a business for people who needed to get off the road for the night and find a peaceful place to stay. It had no pool and the rooms were not glamorous but its location of large surrounding pines, a walkable path through them to a forgotten mill nearby with a pond and a dam that used to power it remains in my memory like something out of a storybook. It was a place of solitude and wonder for a boy from the city of Chicago to spend his summers. My two months hiking, fishing, and exploring by myself were, I know, the seeds that became the honesty I believe I bring to my landscape paintings.

In future blogs I plan on talking more specifically about artists and nature and the varying paths that have been taken.