Landscape Gallery – Oil on Canvas
My earliest memory is of the morning sun backlighting the leaves of the towering elms in front of our house. I was just a baby carried outdoors for the first time. Later I was enthralled by Claude-Lorraines, Turners and the power of N.C. Wyeth’s illustrations for Scribner's Classics. Those inspirations made me want to be a painter.
This gallery is arranged with the latest at the top. So my earliest paintings shown, the Blue Landscape (1965) and Vision of Troy (1966) are at the bottom of the page. They, and the U.P. Landscape, came directly from my young imagination.
When I came back to painting decades later, I began working from photographs of the places where I lived. The two swan paintings, Behold!, The Kiss, Into Autumn, From the Island and Island Path all came from a haven full of mature trees called Loch Alpine in northwest Ann Arbor. Just to the south are the Delhi Rapids of the Huron River. For ten years I lived within sound of them.
The rest of these paintings were based on other people’s photos – and a painting.
Magura Woman is from a photo taken in Rumania by Vicki Swain, who at the time knew no word of the language.
At the Muskegon Art Fair I was discovered by a couple who’d been looking for the right artist. They commissioned the four barns on this page. I especially loved painting the Miller Barn twice, from their photographs, although I’ve never laid eyes on any of ’em.
La Damoyesque is a commission to imitate a French Impressionist named DaMoye from a fuzzy internet pic.
Karvian Kirkko is a portrait of a church in Finland commissioned by the man who started me in photography in high school.
