Rhythms of form, color and pattern… visible from our cars.
I believe the rhythms of form and color and pattern visible from our cars is a truly modern subject matter in contemporary art.
I often drive through farmland on the way to visit family in southern Ontario where I live. And, pun intended, it’s a driving force in my landscape art.
I pass through stunning landscapes that inspire me with rich tapestries of abstract color and texture. And I believe that most people driving those same routes miss the real beauty that’s passing them by, streaking past them in their time-challenged hustle.
While there are for sure stretches of highway, especially along the major 4 or 6-lane routes, that can get numbingly repetitive and plain boring, I find once I get onto the country highways, the visual rhythm of the land changes. It becomes richer, more complex.
Even the rise and fall of the land gets more pronounced on country roads than on the major freeways, because those express routes are designed to be as smooth as possible. Speed rules. The straight line is almost the ideal for those routes, but that same line tends to impose somewhat of a mechanical order onto the landscape it passes through.
But secondary routes are prime source material for the landscape artist.
Country roads as lines in a vast drawing
Think of country roads for a moment, as lines in a vast drawing. Curving lines, full of grace and fun to drive, make for quite a different experience. When I create art, those passages bubble up in my memory, carrying up into consciousness the textures and large scale swaths of color that the lines draw across, releasing them up like bubbles in champagne.
There are spectacular forms and textures, all the stuff of great art, that stream by, slow enough to savor, yet quick enough to animate into a rhythmic flow. That’s what I try and release into my landscape artwork. They arrange into an animated flow of tapestry when I sit down to draw upon my memory and imagination to create landscape art. As I improvise, these textures seem to naturally come to life.
So many of us pass through stunning landscapes like these on the highway, yet remain disconnected from them through a grim focus on where we are going, and how fast we can get there, without savoring the journey itself, and all the visual grandeur we pass through.
Opening our eyes to rich tapestries of landscape
If we’ll just take our eyes off that hypnotic point on the road in the middle distance in front of us when we drive, we’ll open our eyes to rich tapestries of landscape.
It seems to take something like a work of art to wake up our sensibilities. So one of my artistic goals is to inspire us to open our eyes while we drive through vast stretches of our country, to receive the vital spark of life that courses through the lands we most take for granted.
Some of the vegetation we often characterize as scrubland, with its drifts of weeds and bush, are to me like brushstrokes.
The sweep of the plains, the grand scale of rolling hills, are the vast structures that seem to come to life when one drives, as opposed to the static view of painters past.
I soak up the scenes outside the windows of my car and savor them to the max. I hope you’ll do the same.