In my work as a landscape painter, I feel a stronger connection with what I am painting when there is a relation to a real-life place. A place that I have visited myself. There are many ways, and perhaps easier ways, to create a good-looking image of a landscape, but to me it is difficult to feel strongly about a landscape if I haven’t engaged with it in a physical way. This is one of the reasons I enjoy painting outdoors, because you get to spend time working together with the natural elements that are present around you. All your senses are being channeled, and this influences the way you paint. In a way, painting becomes a way to talk back to nature, a way to reach out to where your roots once grew. We are animals still, not technology.
For this painting I wanted to explore this engagement between internal and external nature. And when I say “internal”, I mean what appears to happen within the boundaries of my body. But the experience of the senses, the memories, and the stories with which those are interweaved, they are hard to envision with physical measurements. Though it is true that wherever my body goes, the memories and stories seem to go as well. These memories are not flawless, however. And, because you can’t trust your memory, and you want to make sure you stick to the original story, you take pictures. But in a way you are also repeatedly telling yourself that you can’t trust your memory. That you are handicapped.
Thinking along these lines, two questions popped up in me. First, how bad is my memory really? Can I really not trust myself? Which in my case refers to remembering what I saw in front of me. And secondly, how bad is it that the memory and story change along the way? So, do I need to remember things perfectly, or should I perhaps even invite modifications and errors as I translate my memory of the landscape onto the canvas?
For this painting I picked a spot nearby that I am really fond of, with trees surrounding a large pond. I sat down and picked a scene that could serve as a composition for the painting. Instead of taking pictures, I spend some time looking at it. Then over the next few days I returned to the place and made some notes and mixed a few colors. Just studying the place and trying to help my memory, but avoiding creating a small painting on the spot. Over those few days I could indeed feel that I was internalizing the place and that the visual memory of that place was solidifying.
Then I switched to the studio, prepared a large canvas, and worked in layers until I arrived at the painting you see here. It is the result of multiple layers. In between layers, the paint has to dry. Sometimes for almost a week. So, from start to finish, it took about 2 months or so. During this time, it was good to feel that the memory of the place stayed alive in my mind, even though I hadn’t visited it, nor did I have pictures. Fortunately, that handicap I was referring to earlier wasn’t there. But my relationship to what I had started to paint on my canvas was beginning to develop, and, since I felt that the memory of the place hadn’t faded in me, I also felt less of a need to prove that point in paint. So gradually, after applying more layers of paint, I felt more free to give new shape to the scene and the story in the painting. The result is what you see here. Something that wasn’t there before.
