Zen Spring 2: Cyanotype on Wood Panel Photograph

I live in the woods in northern California. Whenever I leave my house I find myself under an endless web of tree branches. Their silhouettes have etched themselves into my memory over the decades. My paintings and prints are always nature-inspired and nearly always monochromatic. Each one is an immersion in a single color, an ode to that shade. The Japanese have the expression "forest bathing" and I engage in a sort of "color bathing." Throwing several colors together strikes me as visually noisy. Having only varying shades of a single color in a picture exudes a calm, balance and focus that I find deeply attractive. Having spent a decade as a printmaker carving wood cuts and linocuts, printing etchings, aquatints and monotypes, monochrome is how my mind works. I focus on one color at a time, the composition, balance of positive and negative space, patterns, lines and cutout shapes. My paintings are an escape, a window to a simpler world. A perfect walk at twilight, the soft light at sunrise. I like simplicity. I do not like chaos. In my paintings of trees, I want the viewer to experience the beauty of walking under a canopy of trees. In my abstract paintings, I draw on the memories of webs and repeating patterns made by branches and leaves, sometimes quite symmetrically and sometimes in a more free flowing pattern. Wherever you look, there seems to be the shape of leaves. Every mark in my paintings is deliberate, not random, and my colors are often applied thinly and sheer. This is in keeping with my background as a printmaker. Printmakers must plan meticulously before they begin the irreversible process of block carving or acid etching. I do not “muddy” my paint while on the canvas nor lay on paint in a thick impasto. I create thin layers of color, one over the other, the way you roll ink on a block and only the sheerest layer of color is transferred to the paper once it has passed through the press. My color schemes are simple, my lines neat, and my compositions balanced like a Japanese woodcut or a sumi ink painting. I currently work in two mediums, acrylic painting and cyanotypes, a form of camera-less photography. Cyanotypes are a 19th century form of lensless photography also known as photograms, blueprints and sun prints. They resemble block prints or etchings but use no ink nor printing press. Light “etches” the image onto light-sensitive paper.