Landscapes [2004-2007]

January 12, 2023

I'm looking at some of these paintings again after almost 20 years. It is a body of work that I made while studying both painting and printmaking at the Rhode Island School of Design. At that time I went through a great deal of hand-wringing about painting the landscape. Doing this kind of work in that era ('03-'07)—when many other students of painting around me were making work that was big and loud, crass and sarcastic—felt both audacious and pitifully traditional.

As an adult now, who has followed a calling to an entirely different vocation as a minister of word and sacrament in the Lutheran church, these paintings feel distinctly remote, both in terms of their physical practice and certainly the quagmire of egotistic worries of "making it" as an artist. But they also feel freshly and deeply intimate. Then, I wanted to be a painter. That was what the work was about in some ways—going out into the landscape and working plein-air, being cold and mixing paint or preparing copper plates with two coats on and with freezing fingers—living the experience of translating an incredible array of data before me in the created world and coming away with some kind of object, a record of my processing the impossibility of nature.

Oddly enough, the titles of these pieces are what remain evocative for me, because they are names of places. They are places in the American Southwest, but primarily these paintings were made in New England. Indeed, these are names given by colonialists to places that were already inhabited. Interestingly, often these paintings were made in national or state parks and recreation areas—little refuges designated as "natural" within the vast sprawl of residential development, strip malls and industrial decay that is New England. And while these places are, nevertheless, all part of Creation, there is a certain naiveté and romance in them, an edifice of "natural."

Now I see these paintings not primarily as landscapes, but as a record of the end of my childhood. What remains important is recognizing and acknowledging the reality that I grew up in Connecticut, I vacationed at Cape Cod in Massachusetts, I did my undergrad in Rhode Island. What I was doing was not processing the external, not painting the landscape. But this was a tumultuous and painful time of personal and spiritual processing—of growing—spent, ironically, out in the solitude and quiet of the seashore and the woods.

Lincoln, RI (1)

Oil on panel
approx. 12x12 in.

circa 2004

Lincoln, RI (2)

Oil on panel

approx. 12x12 in.

circa 2006-2007

Lincoln, RI (3)

Oil on panel

approx. 12x12 in.

circa 2007

Clinton CT, (1)

Oil on panel

approx. 12x12 in.

circa 2006

Clinton, CT (2)
Oil on panel

approx. 12x12 in.

circa 2006

Eastham, MA

Oil on panel

approx. 12x12 in.

circa 2007

Elephant Butte, NM (1)

Oil on panel

approx. 12x12 in.

circa 2006

Elephant Butte, NM (2)
Oil on panel

approx. 12x12 in.

circa 2006

Uxbridge, MA (1)

Oil on panel

approx. 12x12 in.

circa 2006

Uxbridge, MA (2)

Oil on panel

approx. 12x12 in.

circa 2006

Uxbridge, MA (4)

Oil on panel

approx. 12x12 in.

circa 2006

Uxbridge, MA (6)

Oil on linen

24x24 in.

circa 2006

Uxbridge, MA (7)

Oil on panel

approx. 14x14 in.

circa 2005

Uxbridge, MA (8)

Oil on panel

approx. 12x12 in.

circa 2007

Uxbridge, MA (9)

Oil on linen

approx. 24x36 in.

circa 2006

Guilford, CT

Oil on panel

approx. 12x12 in.

circa 2006

Haddam, CT (1)

Oil on panel

approx. 12x12 in.

circa 2007

Haddam, CT (2)

Oil on panel

approx. 12x12 in.

circa 2007

Higganum, CT

Oil on panel

approx. 12x12 in.

circa 2007

Killingworth, CT

Oil on panel

approx. 12x12 in.

circa 2006

Middletown, CT

Oil on panel

approx. 12x12 in.

circa 2006

Somerset, NJ

Oil on panel

approx. 12x12 in.

circa 2006

Tucson, AZ (1)

Oil on panel

approx. 12x12 in.

circa 2006

Tucson, AZ (2)

Oil on panel

approx. 12x12 in.

circa 2006

Westport, MA (1)

Oil on panel

approx. 12x12 in.

2007

Westport, MA (2)

Oil on canvas

approx. 36x36 in.

2007