Depicting the sense of sacred presence in and through landscape has a long tradition in art, as well as in literature. People throughout the ages and across cultures describe a sense of the sacred when immersed in nature. Landscape is used as a metaphor for spiritual experience in scriptures, writings of mystics, and literature from around the world. The Everglades paintings depict a primordial garden pulsing with abundant life and potentiality like the creative soup from which we evolved.
In this body of work, is part of my sabbatical of 2005, I have used heightened color to depict the light, pattern, and energy charged landscapes of Tuscany, South Florida and the Everglades, and Le Puy. These are beautiful places, and I have attempted to translate their beauty into two-dimensional paintings using energized mark making, complementary and analogous color harmonies, and perspective that suggests deep space. The scale of the watercolor paintings, while at first practical, since I usually painted on location, also gave the paintings a compressed power—every square inch is charged with color and mark-making. I chose to present the paintings in jewel-colored mats and gold frames in order to place them in the genre of religious art. I mean them to be contemplations on the beauty of creation in which God is giver and gift.
