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If you return to "The Artist" page, you will see a very brief synopsis of my professional life and a general statement of intent about the work -- almost
everything I do is connected with a love of the land, expressed here by these
prints. Before being more specific about what I am trying to do and before exploring the triggers that helped generate the work, understand that "a love of the land" is not an empty phrase. I have spent a
good deal of my life on farms -- my mother and stepfather owned farms in Yorkshire in England; as a sculptor, to model in clay is my preferred
medium; as a landscape architect I work in a very "hands-on" fashion and see myself happiest as a working gardener rather than as a landscape designer. I spend a lot of time in my own garden. My experience with the land really is at the root of these prints.
I have lived in the United States for over 30 years, but I am still very much aware of my English background. No one can grow up in England without being party to
the special relationship that the English have with their landscape. It is expressed, of course, in their gardening, but also in their poetry and. most appropriately here, in their painting. One cannot go through
an art school education in England without knowing of English landscape painting, particularly in watercolors.
I became fascinated with the history of landscape painting. It seemed to me that, in the right hands, the depiction of a scene did much more than describe a surface appearance or make a pretty
picture postcard. A fine landscape painting could look beyond the immediate and the finite and explore the endless physical world we inhabit and somehow explain our place in it. A few years ago, I visited a Poussin
exhibition. After tiring rooms of allegorical and historical paintings that barely interested me, I came to a large hall entirely devoted to his
landscapes. I stood in the middle of the room and was profoundly moved. I felt a sensation akin to being in a cathedral. This was one man's exposition of how he saw the Universe, how it was created and how he,
and we, fit in.
I also developed a parallel interest in more popular landscape imagery. As a student I worked in my father's antiquarian book shop, helping with the cataloging. I was always fascinated with the category of "Topography" and the
prints that were produced in the centuries before photography in order to show scenes of noble houses and gardens and views from travels on the Grand Tour. These were often finely textured aquatints
and mezzotints, occasionally hand-colored. As printing technologies became more sophisticated, so developed something of a Golden Age of British illustration, based largely on
creating a painterly feel, but simplified to meet the needs of the printing press. The Grand Tour was replaced by the poster for the holiday by the
seaside and the wonderful prints of quintessentially English countryside hung in railway carriages. The American equivalent was the glorious poster
of the western landscape exhorting people to settle the lands opened up -- and owned -- by the railroad company. The details of prints on this page reflect this influence.
At one shoulder I have a high art that reflects the changes in man's
understanding of his world and at the other, a popular art that reflects a more open society that may not merely dream of remote nature but can actually picnic, or even live there. As I become more embroiled in developing and printing my landscape images, these twin fascinations are always in the background. I make no attempt to copy
Poussin or the lithographers for the Union Pacific, but they are there in the shadows behind me.
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