I find great enjoyment and comfort in the act of painting landscapes. Landscapes offer unlimited possibilities.  Each painting is like a puzzle that must be pieced together through a process of creating and destroying. The landscapes are eventually revealed to me through a constant working and reworking, erasing, building and destroying of paint and worlds. Large gestural marks sweep across the canvas. Frenetic movements of color smear and slam together- creating jagged peaks or misty shorelines. The painting is finished when the landscape is fully revealed within the paint.

Within the landscape, I am looking for the atmosphere and the emotion of the painting. The movement of paint and mark making are used to create a certain type of emotion within the atmosphere itself. I am looking for tense moments, ambiguous moments, and quiet moments. All three can exist within the world on the canvas. Ambiguous moments in the painting allow the viewer to bring their own emotion and experiences, and find their own story within the painting.

In my own paintings, I relate to those moments of tension when you come over a rise, and you see a distant glow of what ends up becoming a skyline, a campfire,  or something that suggests you are approaching a destination. Those moments are deeply moving and highly personal experiences. I paint what I see when I come over the rise.

 However, I also gravitate toward painting condensed environments like swamps, jungles, the woods, caves, etc.  I find deep consolation in that density. Some work starts with expansive skies- over a tree-line, others with forests so dark that it consumes the horizon completely. I paint what I see when I am far from the rise.

Regardless of what  can be imagined or seen in any piece, what I strive for, is not to tell the complete story. I'm not painting you a picture. I'm showing you a place.


-Claire Richards