Here’s a new piece I finished this past week, a 13″ by 33″ tryptych on paper. It will be framed in a 20″ by 40″ frame so it will have some size giving it visual impact on the wall.
From the very start, the colors that were coming out as I built the foreground were deep and saturated. Each section had dark edges and a brightness in the center that gave it the appearance of having light streaming through it as though it were stained glass. In fact, as it grew it looked more and more like the stained glass one might find in a cathedral. I’m not sure the effect will come through in the photography or on the computer screen but in the studio it has that sort of color quality.
It was this feel that prompted the title Altarpiece. I see the landscape as forming a natural altar, perhaps a marriage altar with the two trees at the center intertwined. Or perhaps the intertwined trees represent the natural world’s connection with the spiritual world. I don’t know.
I think there is a sense here of spiritual quiet that you might associate with the the calm silence of a large church, a stillness that prompts reflection and reverence. I am not a religious man in any sense of the word but I am drawn to religious sanctuaries for that feeling that comes from them, one that I find much like that feeling I experience in the quiet of the forest or in a wide and open field. It focuses one’s own stillness and clears away the chaff created by normal worry. Which is my hope for this piece.
Redtree Times 