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Black Creek

I work exclusively with landscape imagery in my paintings because I love the eccentricity of nature. I seek out natural subjects that emanate a strong unique feeling or personification. This large oil-on-canvas painting depicts an area of Black Creek Preserve in Upstate New York and shows the incredible hemlock forest that is protected there. When the piney needles of the trees fall into the creek, the tannins turn the water black … hence the name of the preserve. The painting is also part of a larger body of paintings that I made inspired by Southern author, Eudora Welty’s, short story, Moon Lake. The story describes the night sky as “pale as a green grape, transparent as grape flesh over each tree” … “the grape of the air.” The mood and color palette of the paintings in the group respond to the lush, dense, deep woods portrayals in the story and present images of nature that seem filtered through an emerald glass. Each painting sits on the boundary of night’s blackness and daytime’s sunlight, distilled through a prism of green.