My present paintings of mountains and sea are vistas of memory — our America the beautiful. They are meant to glorify our land and honor those people who first lived upon it.
The ocean paintings are based on trips to the Newport, Rhode Island area, primarily Aquidneck Island. I have been visiting the Atlantic shore all of my life, but never thought it possible to actually paint it. I decided to try, since we go there rather often and I find it very beautiful, especially off-season. And besides, I needed a challenge. We are not summer visitors – but fall and winter birds. We walk the beaches bundled up for the blustery winds. I sketch and take photos, then pore over both when we return home. I love the muted colors — I love the sea air, the feel of it and smell of it. I would like these paintings to convey that feeling of the sea, as well as the look of it.
In 2014 my husband, Dirk, and I visited Nevada and Eastern California to see the Sierra Nevada mountains and their magnificent majesty. They are truly quite overwhelming. The geology of that part of our country is fascinating, “newly” formed by great volcanic eruptions that have created huge fissures and jagged peaks.
We were there only a brief time, and it isn’t “my” land yet. I don’t own it intellectually or visually the way I feel I “own” the mountains of the southwest, or the waters of the east coast. These are different mountains — awesome and foreboding.
I began these paintings thinking that they would become a kind of cloud atlas, describing the clouds over the ocean and the mountains. I am now living in an area where I can see the sky — unlike my other city homes where the sky was always a tiny bit of blue (or white) above the tall trees and buildings. Now that I can see the sky, I am much more aware of it everywhere I go. And the skies over the Atlantic Ocean and the Sierra Nevadas are often spectacular. Yet the more I painted, the more important became the mountains and sea themselves. And the sky took its appropriate place as our great back-drop. Our lovely metaphor for the future, for heaven, for beauty, for goodness, for home and for eternity.
