The artist’s reflections on the individual works above . . .
Badger Creek was painted shortly after a trip to Kearney, NE. I spent three days watching the spring migration of hundreds of sandhill cranes along the Platte River. The days were overcast and the birds melted in and out of view. The sights and sounds were overwhelming. I included the badger skull in the insert as a way to bring an intimacy to the experience and as a way of continuing my exploration of merging contrasting imagery.
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No Snow - On the central plain of Montana, our winters can be piercingly cold and very dry. On those occasions, the night sky literally crackles with stars and the aurora borealis sweep the landscape with colors. No Snow is the result. I want to share the particular beauty which can be experienced only at such times and place and is part of the lives in our rural communities. I was definitely influenced by Van Gogh’s Starry Night.
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Other Worlds than These is part of an ongoing series in which I explore a phrase loosely borrowed from Stephen King’s Gunslinger trilogy in which he creates a parallel universe similar to ours and yet introduces elements which aren’t quite right. I also borrow from the slightly disturbing imagery found in the work of Edward Hopper. In this case, the calm autumnal panels with sun spots contrast with the naked lady in the window – the watcher.
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Speaking Ring - In Central Montana, there are many medicine rings which the First People use in religious ceremonies. In the Gunslinger, the hero, Rolland, uses the “speaking ring” to provide pathways into other worlds. I like the idea that we can create spaces in paintings that allows for multiple views. This is why in Speaking Ring I bring the immediacy of bones and stone ring together and then extend to the viewer a well defined canyon in which we can open up our senses of the natural world.
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Three Sisters is a deliberate play on a series of small land formations outside of Taos, NM. The forms were transposed to Montana, and I couldn’t resist using to birdlike qualities of the columbine to soar through the open space. (Thank you O’Keefe for showing us how to use flowers without limitations.) We have many geologic spines which run across the open prairies and this led to the inclusion of the backbone that guides the eye from the foreground back to the small isolated island range.
About the New Works in the Gallery . . . .
I was recently inspired by Thomas Struth’s chromogenic print: The Restorers at San Lorenzo Maggiore Naples,1988, to paint Bryce Canyon with Ravens. I created a wall of stacked sandstone slabs in morning light similar to his stacking paintings waiting to be restored. He used the people to make dimensional sense out of his work, while I decided to use ravens in flight as a way to carve out the space.
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Bryce Canyon in Fog is a direct outcome of camping at the National Park during one of the wettest events in recent memory. Colors literally dissolved as clouds moved down into the canyon or draped across the rim. To capture this effect, I used an endless number of thin layers of water based mediums, sometimes glazing and other times also dissolving the colors wet into wet.
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Bryce Canyon by Moonlight resorts to my love of the use of charcoal and its wonderful richness of darks and lights. The imagery is taken from the organic human quality of the carved sandstone. Some of my earliest work played with this theme. In this case however, I was deeply moved by a photograph of Magdalena Abakanwicz’s Back. It consists of 80 backs made of burlap and glue set in a natural setting that reminded me of the southwest and parts of Montana.
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Moab triptychis a straight watercolor landscape done after I got back from a February trip to the area. It is a composite of the land as it descends down from snow capped La Salle Mountains across the petrified dunes of Arches to the deeper reaches of the canyon walls as seen from Dead Horse Point. Each panel can be viewed as a stand alone from its neighbor to give more of a private view or together to create the larger panoramic effect.
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Color of Music V is part of a series I am doing of blues musicians. It gives me room to explore a more abstract quality in the work and tackle some richly challenging color combinations. I keep using the human form in this series because I love to draw and the musicians act as easy visual references to the theme.
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Cascade of Color derives from a still-life series which I began exploring back in the 70’s. Flower bouquets offer wonderful drawing opportunities both of the positive and negative shapes, and their colors are grand springboards for the imagination.
A brief statement about my work . . .
My work explores color and spatial relationships. A single painting may contain multiple views of an area, going from up close detail to vast distances. To me this is much like what occurs as people view their daily experiences. We focus on a detail and then look out more broadly over the richness of our environment.
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Over the course of my 40 year career, I have often used individual panels within a work as a means of exploring spatial relationships. The relationship that follows establishes variations on a theme. I consider each view similar to a stanza of a poem – a thought imbedded in and supporting the integrity of the whole piece. Hence the name of the website: "Visual Poetry".
I acknowledge the rich historical influences of the Chinese scroll and screen painters, the Northern Renaissance artists and the artists of the late 19th and 20th Century.
Colors, the flow of lines, and the repetitive echo of shapes provide the formal transitions between the panels. It is interesting to find ways of merging different views within the paintings so as to leave the impression that of course, this is the natural way the scene would be viewed.
I began my career working with oil paints and doing a lot of intense black and white charcoal drawing, but since the 1980s have worked primarily with the mediums of water color, gouache, ink, pastels, and colored pencils. The paintings combine the materials through an extensive layering process (often ten or more thin layers) which allows the work to achieve its expressive richness.
Visit the Distinctly Montana Magazine to read the article published about my work.
For more information contact:
Clint Loomis Fine Art Studio
cloomis@midrivers.com
406.535.7380 or 406.366.3068