After forty years of plein air painting with oil pastels or oil paints, I’ve begun working with gouache on watercolor blocks. It’s been incredibly liberating to use a new medium, especially one so portable. The year twenty twenty-five was a year full of travel, first through Rajasthan India, and then a month long artist residency in Pouch Cove, Newfoundland. There was a stay at Anderson Ranch in Snowmass, CO followed by an epic road trip through the Southwest, and the year ended with a visit to Northern California.

So now I have a studio filled with small gouaches, made both here in the Hudson Valley and far afield. I’ve begun making relatively large oil paintings directly from these gouaches in much the same way as I began painting landscapes in the early 1980’s. The gouaches are gridded with thread and become my primary reference. The subject of the paintings has become “what happened” in the gouaches, the immediacy of the brushstrokes and colors observed plein air, mark-making writ large, not transferred but transposed to find the “psychology” of these places. And there were small plein air oil paintings made onsite. These too become fodder for larger paintings in the studio.