Everything You've Loved (oil on canvas, 2022)

(Private Collection)

When I was in my fourth year of college as an undergrad student I did an independent study in painting with an instructor named Dan Hill. I would go to his office once a week with all of the work that I had done and we would look at it and talk about it. He would make suggestions, mostly in the form of exercises that would help me focus on development of specific technical deficiences, of which I had many! The exercises were extremely helpful and I would usually do more than what he suggested. One such exercise involved painting a flat red rectrangle, maybe 5" x 3", in the center of a 9" x 12" canvasboard. I then had to paint the rest of the canvas so that it appeared concave behind the flat red rectangle. I repeated the exercise, but with the background appearing convex, and then again with the background appearing to recede from left to right, top to bottom, etc.. Although tedious and difficult, these exercises were very helpful in terms of teaching me how to use color and value to make a flat surface appear three-dimensional and I am still grateful to this day for the time spent working on them.

Meanwhile, I was also attemting to make these ridiculously ambitious landscape paintings that were years (perhaps decades) beyond my technical abilities at the time. Eventually, I scaled back to simple still lifes painted from direct observation so that I could focus on the fundamentals of how to transform oil colors into form, space, and light. Early in the semester, however, I brought in a painting in progress of a filed with round hay bales in it, a barn in the distance, and large cumulus clouds in a blue sky. I had recently purchased a French easel and had taken my painting supplies out into that field, which was only a couple of miles from my house, and painted from observation. I felt like a "real" artist. The painting, of course, was a disaster. On seeing it, Dan Hill suggested that I look up John Constable, who had painted a lot of cloud studies. Neither of us had any idea at the time how precient that was. Constable would eventually become a major influence for me, and I might some day find myself painting clouds in a way that wasn't a disaster.