My most recent landscape is an evolution. The majority of my paintings are well thought out and finished according to a plan. Some few, like the ones below, end up quite differently than originally envisioned and are better  for it : )

Behind every story is a supporting cast of characters and events. It’s a given. With paintings, there’s no voice for the parts that helped make the painting but which aren’t left in the image. That’s a good reason to fully document each piece but most of the time the whole story never gets told because it’s not important to the picture, interesting though it may be.

In my art stories, the main subject gets a setting or a background which I call the ‘symphony’, since visually it mirrors songs that I have loved in which if the singer were muted, the music that supports her warbling would still be rich and beautiful. Sometimes it’s so great that as good as she is, you wish the singer would just stand aside and allow the symphony the full stage. So I’ll often put that much soul into the background when I think it will make the main characters all the better.

Here are examples of where the background art was so satisfying that the rest never got painted in.  The snowy tree painting is headed that direction.

This one is a waterfall somewhere else in the world that I painted to provide a feeling of enormity in the space it fills. The water cascades again and again until it divides over the rocks and gurgles away in calmly in a forest of giant leafy trees. I don’t even remember what I had in mind to finish it. For now this early painting is happy as it is.

This one was to be of a girl on her horse in the clear tropical waters. Despite that it’s done in quickly executed acrylic paint, the water has the clarity and translucence of opal and it says more than if I’d gone ahead with the horse and girl.

This was to be a hike. I arranged it so that the hikers would be between the distant mountain and the foreground where actual inhabitants of the area are engaged in their lives. The hikers never made it to the scene because I loved how the image shows that no matter how vast the world you live in, the part that matters to you directly is the part that sustains you now.

This painting, still wet and in process was a symphony component I have long intended to paint. Long ago, I did a little pastel picture of a girl waiting in the snow at a bust stop. I painted a snowy forest behind her. Both copies are in the care of other people and I wanted my own to keep. I’ve devised several scenes and this is one of many ideas, the details of which aren’t necessary to describe here. As it progresses, I am changing my mind about how this one will be finished, leaving the story much simpler like the fully realized background music of song.