Patterns

Creatively, I've been mulling over patterns. Literal and physical patterns in our environment, such as architecture, wallpaper, row crops, as well as cultural patterns. How single motifs or behaviors add up in meaningful ways over the course of a lifetime of a person or a landscape or a community. How we repeat the same societal patterns over and over and over until they become calcified habits in our communities, no matter the cost or damage.

And how change happens in spite of all that.

(You know. Breezy stuff.)

Here's how that's starting to show up on the easel.

They start out simple enough. I wanted to be a bit more deliberate in the underpainting instead of just slopping color everywhere.

This reminded me of enthusiastic wallpaper. And yes, that's gold.

Evolution. An underpainting for a landscape painting of Mississippi Delta farm.

I located an architectural element from a building on the property (see below), repeated it, adding windows for visual interest. Gold + Silver.

And then there’s the River. We received a framed Fisk map of the Mississippi River as a wedding gift, and it’s one of my most prized possessions.

If you’re unfamiliar, Howard Fisk was a geographer and cartographer for the US Army Corps of Engineers who created these maps of the lower Mississippi River to capture its ever-shifting quality and effect on the surrounding alluvial plain.

Exquisite doesn’t quite capture it, right?

And the hilarious part is that Fisk apparently created these to add a little visual interest to an otherwise dull-as-dishwasher government memo entitled “The Nature and Origin of the Alluvial Valley of the Lower Mississippi River.” The colors signify pathways that the Mighty Miss took in previous centuries.

I see this image dozens of times a day, so naturally it seeps in. And seems fitting to begin a painting of a site in Sharkey County, an area devastated by flooding in 2019.

I’ll be releasing this collection in the next two weeks, so sign up for the WGP newsletter for first access to these paintings. A bonus for signing up is a handwritten postcard sent by your truly.