Landscapes are Love Letters

Landscapes as Love Letters

What is it about landscapes? I love them. have old photo albums full of wide shots of landscapes of places I’ve visited. Now I look and sometimes think, where was that taken? Why did I take so many photos? My husband jokes that while others take selfies we tend to take tons of landscape photos that are stuffed away on a shelf or in cloud files. 

I am able to flip through them and pause with a memory and use them as inspiration for painting landscapes.

Loving Travel, It’s only natural that each landscape reminds me of the feeling and experience of the place

I often paint or sketch landscapes as warm-ups and often repaint them onto larger paper or canvas. There is something about the vastness of the horizon, the strength of mountains, the freedom of open -sky that draws me to collecting and painting landscapes. My challenge has been to represent that feeling in a small painting the size of a postcard or on 5x7 inch paper.

Landscapes are wonderful studies of how light and shadow play over distances. It’s sometimes tough to focus and compose a picture when you are surrounded by so many land formations and plants. What shapes should I include and which should I dismiss as I choose the layout of the scene? Usually, I feel freedom and peace when I see the bigness of the world in a landscape. I may focus on depicting color, shape, light, and shadow but it is the vastness of the world that impresses me as I draw it down in pen and stroke the brush to a flat sheet of paper.  

Es verdad, el mundo es grande.

It’s true, the world is big. Landscape photos and paintings make me feel hope and peace in seeing and painting all that space.

 LANDSCAPES IN MY SHOP-FOR SALE LANDSCAPE IN MY PORTFOLIO-FOR SALE