
Explain your creative process, why vineyards?
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[caption id="attachment_995" align="alignnone" width="520" caption=""untitled", charcoal on canvas board, Ann Rea"]
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Next week I’ll begin my harvest of color at Benovia’s vineyards for my collectors Mark and Nancy. Benovia’s autumn harvest of grapes will also begin, so I’ll have to dodge production while I paint and make sure that I’m clear out of their way.
Someone recently asked “Why vineyards?” Explain your creative process. I started landscape painting by focusing on wild, natural, organic landscapes of wetlands and farms returning to riparian habitat.
The first time I painted a vineyard I was drawn to (no pun intended) the architectural elements of this landscape, the rows of grapes that streak across the acres defining the curves of the land.
Why was I attracted to this visual element? Well, when I was in art school one of the things I did to pay the rent and tuition was architectural renderings. Three-point perspective is often not many architects’ strong suit.
So I became very practiced in spatial perception. Forms closer to us appear bigger; things in the distance appear smaller. Their specific proportion to one another in drawing is called perspective. This is a discipline that I find intriguing and a vineyard gives me an opportunity to explore this.
And I find that being out among nature feeds my soul. My subject is not actually the vineyard but the forms it takes as color. Color inspired by natural light.
It’s a challenge to express my thoughts about my creative process. But I appreciate one sentence in particular from a collector who remarked about my work. “Patience and persistence in getting to know your subject matter so well. It really is a destiny based on love of life.”
So if one looks at this body of work, only literally or symbolically, the way that much of our culture is oriented, it is yet another vineyard painting. For me, the artist, it's a new landscape, with different forms, and colors. Each piece is a new exploration, a meditation of color and form.
