Study nature, ...
love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you. -- Frank Lloyd Wright
Architecture is my full time job. Out of that endeavor, I have developed a great affinity for Frank Lloyd Wright’s wisdom. I have read a great deal of his advice, and it all applies to painting as an art as readily as it does to architecture as art. His definition of art is “a discovery and development of principles of nature into beautiful forms suitable for human use.”
I like to imagine that I am bringing something of nature onto the canvas. In architectural drafting the goal is a functional yet artful form. With artistic drawing and painting, the goal includes bringing the feeling of nature into the painting as well as the form.
Someday I hope to be able to do more painting on site. Right now, it is my great joy to hike into some of the scenic parts of Arkansas which are so abundant here in the Ozarks. While I take a lot of photos, I am also memorizing the feeling of an area, and try to stay in touch with that feleing when I take the photos back to my studio.
I like to imagine that I am bringing something of nature onto the canvas. In architectural drafting the goal is a functional yet artful form. With artistic drawing and painting, the goal includes bringing the feeling of nature into the painting as well as the form.
Someday I hope to be able to do more painting on site. Right now, it is my great joy to hike into some of the scenic parts of Arkansas which are so abundant here in the Ozarks. While I take a lot of photos, I am also memorizing the feeling of an area, and try to stay in touch with that feleing when I take the photos back to my studio.
The composition of the art is based on the natural beauty of the “golden mean,” which is found everywhere in nature. This mathematical contribution straight from nature gives the painting a pleasing look to the eye. To me, that lets the feeling nature of the art come through better.
If perchance you see me out on a hike, I’ll most often be taking photos, or just as likely, I will be sitting still just looking, listening, breathing in the aromas, and gathering in the entire beauty of the area. Those are the things I most want to express on the canvas.
Lost Valley
Boxley area, from the Buffalo River Trail
What a remarkably blessed and beautiful part of the world this is, here in the Ozarks, for the artists who live here! The gathering material to produce a painting is as enjoyable as the painting later becomes.
As Frank Lloyd Wright has said, to create art, study nature, love it and learn from it. No matter where I am, I find lessons in nature. Not all of it is “pretty,” but there is beauty in all of it. I feel a sense of purpose in my painting and artistic endeavors when I can feel like I have opened the eyes of just a few people to seeing beauty. While we honor Truth, and Goodness, sometimes the Western world trivializes Beauty. We are impoverished without it, yet it freely gives itself to us all around us in nature. The ocean offers a whole different sort of beauty, and it resonates with me as much as the Ozarks. In fact, every place in nature has its own particular resonance, its own particular type of beauty.
The longer I live the more beautiful life becomes. If you foolishly ignore beauty you will soon find yourself without it. You will be impoverished. But if you invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life. --- Frank Lloyd Wright