Transparency
“Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor exact truth, but in the way of feeling.”-Baudelaire
This past weekend I participated in the first round of the Marin Arts Open, aka Open Studios. We’ll be having our second round this coming weekend, Saturday and Sunday, May 8 and 9 from 11-6.
The weekend brought many visitors to our building (The Isabel Cook Building, 1000 Sir Francis Drake Blvd., San Anselmo, CA) to look at what we we’ve all been doing.
For the past couple of years my work has evolved into various scenes where water is the primary subject matter; be it a waterfall, a lake, a pool, reflections of water, rippling of water, currents of water, patterns of water, moving water, still water. I’m not quite sure how I as a Landscape painter of sorts have arrived here, but arrived I have. I attribute it to either my almost daily swim, to the fact that my moon sign is Pisces or because I live in Marin County where bodies of water are omnipresent. I have described the many moods of water both representationally and abstractly, sometimes in the same painting, sometimes leaning more towards abstraction, sometimes more towards representation. This past weekend one of the viewers of my work said, “Oh this work is so Romantic.” And I somehow felt unveiled, discovered, revealed. The truth was out! Under this hardboiled, pragmatic presentation of “what is,” was the inner romantic, still alive and well, fully transparent.