New Works: Landscape and Abstraction

I have been thinking a lot about the boundary between landscape and abstraction. The Blue Geometric Landscape series started as observational work — plein air sketches on the hills near Malexander — but evolved in the studio into something more architectonic.

Color relationships began to matter more than topographic accuracy. The green of a hill became a shape first, then a color, then a relationship between shapes and colors. At some point the landscape disappeared and something else took its place.

This is the process I find most interesting: beginning from observation and following the work wherever it leads. I do not begin a canvas with a plan to make an abstract painting. I begin by looking at something. The abstraction arrives when the looking becomes more important than the depicting.

The Swedish landscape lends itself to this. It has a geometric quality — the straight lines of the forest edge, the flat horizon of the lake, the way fields divide into rectangular sections. There is already something abstract in the landscape itself, if you look long enough.