Burning Bush
Annie Dillard relates a story about a little girl who saw "the tree with the lights in it." Dillard thought of Moses and the burning bush, and wished for such a vision. One day she sees it in a cedar ... sensing each cell aflame. She says it was less like seeing than being.
My daughter Kate, at the age of three, gazed out our back window and said: "The tree is red and purple and blue and green and yellow." The wine-colored maple was indeed all of those colors as the leaves reflected the blue sky, or let the sunlight filter through like the transparency of stained glass. And so a leaf may be anything but green or anything plus green. And water too may reflect the sky or reveal a penetrating light.
The paintings are improvisations based on vignettes observed along the Kinderhook Creek on our land, down the hill from my studio. Rivers and creeks have been translated into compositions that reciprocate between representation and abstraction. One writer called this a “surface tension”: first you see the landscape; then you see the paint.
My work swings in a cycle from reporting the landscape (noting the condition of our natural environment) to creating abstracted inventions that reveal the tracks and marks of the brushes and knives that construct the image.
One thing hasn’t changed. I do not paint plein air. It is still important that I observe, and then go to the studio to recover my thoughts.
Stephen Pentak
March 28, 2011