John’s Landscapes

In my landscape paintings I'm primarily focused on composition and light. Color is typically of less concern, though lately I have been purposefully working with a very narrow palette. Beyond the overall composition, I am very interested, and maybe a little obsessed, with continuing to experiment with the depiction of surfaces. How many ways can a sky be depicted and how many ways might that sky be read by the viewer? What happens at the intersection of two planes of color and how much work does the eye naturally do to complete the picture?... How much should I do to complete the experience for the viewer?

What is the greater context of this work? The subtle topographies found at the intersection of land and water seem important to me now. The word "topography" often presents itself in the title of my paintings. In the context of our wounded planet it's curious to me that people seem certain of the importance of our continued role as the dominant species. I recently looked up how long the dinosaurs were the dominant species vs. the time span of humans in that role. Dinosaurs, it is believed through the fossil record, existed over a span of 165 million years - humans by contrast have been around for approximately 6 million years, and only in our current "evolved" state for the last 200,000 years.

Hypothetical maps of +/- 200 million years ago (Paleozoic transitioning to Mesozoic) depict the land masses of Earth as one large continent called "Pangea" . We can't know what the shores of Pangea were like, but assuming that the coming together and breaking apart of continents has been happening at more or less the same pace over time, I imagine that the intersection of earth and sea has always varied from the violent and dramatic to the gentle and subtle.

I see my own fascination with the intricate push and pull at this intersection as the uncovering of a kind of coda in which the planet is revealing the potential give and take at the meeting point of two very different systems. The mud flats of Brewster Mass for example, reveal a moment where a thin film of ocean stretches curiously over the broad foot of the continent - exploring, probing and creating a new singular ecosystem that only occurs at this intersection. We are drawn to it. The ocean reminds us that our tether to the earth is fragile, that we can exist at the edge only because the earth and sea have an understanding of how to meet, overlap and hear the voice of the other. It seems to me it is no coincidence that the physical beauty of the shoreline is universal to us at this moment of eternal dialogue.