Summer Breeze & Summer Birches

"Summer Breeze"

"Summer Birches No. 1"

Today's post features three summer themed works titled Summer Breeze, and Summer Birches Numbers 1 & 2. The summer landscape has influenced my work profoundly this year. In viewing leaves fluttering on the summer breeze and sparkles dancing across summer lakes, I've endeavored to capture the effects of these summer themes on canvas. My skies and lakes now feature more distinguished brush strokes, and the leaves on the trees are also more distinct, the black undertones on the canvas showing through giving depth and something else to my work that I like to call visual texture. Visual texture causes someone to view a 2D painting in a new way, looking intently at the work instead of a mere glance. This visual texture thought that I have with my work has been there from the beginning, I've just been able to articulate it more recently.

"Summer Birches No. 2"

As an artist you want to grow every time you work, the last thing you want is to reach a point where you're comfortable with your work and you keep producing the same painting over and over. I've come close to falling into the comfort trap, but I've worked on a theme repetitively as I knew there was something there that I had to grasp and so would keep at it until I achieved whatever it was I had to say visually. These pieces today are simple summer studies to some viewers, but to me, they represent five years of painting, five years of visual soul searching, endless hours of painting ... I hope you enjoy them. But art is subjective in nature, so you may not, and that's ok. I'm off to the easel, to continue my quest for visual texture. Please contact Siiviis Gallery in Duluth for more information on these pieces.