Autumn Blowing In

Autumn Blowing In
Oil on stretched canvas, 10x20

Call me at 860-442-0246 or email me

if you are interested in buying this painting

This wind, it's what they'd call "a freshening breeze" in another century. It came out of nowhere, and brought rain with it last night. Today, it's tearing leaves from the trees, and brushing autumn along in front of it.

I've always loved a windy day. There's excitement in it, in the rush of air, and scents, and the very chaos of possibility.

A couple months ago, I got a great book on Andrew Wyeth, for $2 at a library book sale. It's probably a $100 book, and weighs enough to make you remember that paper is, in fact, made out of wood.

I spent part of yesterday poring over Wyeth's work, and the marvelous writing by Richard Meryman, and thinking about my painting in light of Wyeth's. One thing Wyeth and I share is a fascination with landscapes that are about nothing, and that contain nothing. He had the skill and vision to play them down from there; it is my tendency to play them up. And that's fine. I don't want to be Wyeth, and never will be, but I love his low-color approaches, his astonishing attention to detail, his quiet and intense brooding. I exult in these landscapes of nothingness, finding life and glee and optimism, where he finds death and sorrow and that luscious range of browns and sepias and colors of the quiet soul.

If I don't want to be Wyeth, well, I'd be happy to be one-tenth as successful.