Familiar Places and New Directions

Beginning at the age of 9, and for the better part of the last 40 years, I have painted from experience. The landscapes represented on my canvases have primarily been Wisconsin landscapes, birds, and animals. Below is one of my favorite places in Door County– the causeway to Cana Island Lighthouse. On this particular day the manifold blues found in the water and the air surrounded me with overwhelming serenity. Stevens Falls (above) is a focal event at Governor Dodge State Park. Works featuring these places I call home will continue to offer a lifetime of subjects and experiences. And yet, at what I hope is the midpoint in my artistic development, a compelling wanderlust is telling me to look beyond the familiar and to follow in some new directions.

Discovering the opportunities Google Earth offers to explore new landscapes has solved a problem for me that time and finances have made prohibitive. I have so enjoyed my 4 hour tours along the northern coast of Ireland and my surprise to discover penguins in South Africa. Although initially I asked myself if art made from virtual travel was legitimate, I am finding it fascinating that these travels are becoming a deep part of the fabric of my experience. The extraordinary amount of hours I’ve spent in these places has indeed imprinted real memories and the images that excite me can easily be recalled, as in person memories often do. And it is interesting that many of our “experiences” are now virtual, with the inordinate amount of time that humans seem to be spending on their devices on social media sites. It may be the question of this period of human existence: What is the impact on our creative endeavors of lived versus virtual experience?

During in person travel we miss so much. We travel at 70 miles an hour and tour at break neck speeds to ensure we hit every must see. In fact one of the realities of travel is how much you miss when you are there mostly due to constraints of time and access. There is no time to linger and ponder or wander off the beat and track. But virtual travel can be slow. Virtual travel need not justify. We “drive” one click at a time to advance along, and we can look in any direction, taking hundreds of photos as we would if I were really there. Virtual travel is much like looking at art in a museum or examining the weeds in your own backyard. On Google Earth time stands still and curiosity can be satiated in ways impossible on a guided and thus time limited tour of the buried ruins of Vesuvius.

But where to travel virtually when you can literally go anywhere (except North Korea as it turns out)? I am taking my prompts from literature and stories I hear on the radio or read about in the paper. After reading James Joyce’s short stories I traveled to the bridge his characters walked on. After reading about philosopher Walter Benjamin, I was moved by his compelling escape to Spain and death at Portbou, Spain to avoid being captured by the Nazis. I read a story about a discovery of WW I American soldier’s signatures buried under paint on a chimney in a house in Charmoy, France . The 27th Engineers stayed in the town a month before they went to the front. Below is an oil painting of a farm building found in this rural town where time stands still.