The View from the Ridge has captivated me for over a decade, inviting me to pause with my dog at the same spot each day. We follow the neighborhood sidewalk around a bend, begin our descent of a long, steep hill, and there it reveals itself: a shimmering, beckoning tableau. As the start of 2019 approached, I began returning to the studio to put down my impressions. Over the course of the year, 90 small works were completed. Each painting began with a specific recollection of color, light, and weather but evolved in its own direction. Some paintings retained the fresh immediacy of the moment, while others conflated multiple days or blurred into the distillations of memory and imagination. The field across the road displayed a range of soft grays in the winter, an exhilarating chartreuse in the spring, deep saturated greens in the summer, and a radiant golden glow in the fall. Each season brought new colors and atmospheres. Each hour, new glances of sunlight and shapes of shadow. Each moment, a unique opportunity.
Despite my penchant for exuberant high contrast color palettes, I soon learned to embrace the subtly shifting neutrals of foggy mornings and overcast skies. The springtime provided translucent glazes of warm rain, then playful splashes of clear pink. Painting patiently through the monotonous greens of humid summer days, I was startled one morning to find vivid stripes of red-orange clay, my palette unexpectedly invigorated by a freshly plowed field. As the leaves began to fall in autumn, caught up in the sweep of the wind, my brushstrokes took on new and unfamiliar rhythms. Each day I felt inspired and expectant, grateful for whatever gifts might be offered. Observing the mercurial atmospheres of the outer world and the fickle weather of my own thoughts and emotions, I found myself able and willing to tenderly examine both the outer and the inner landscape. It was from this centered place that I could always make the next painting.
At the close of the year, I was not ready to leave the view behind. After so many miles of walking and witnessing, this landscape had papered the background of my mind, embossed with the imprints of meditation, rumination, and reflection. Both naturalistic and surreal imaginings overlaid the vista in the landscape of my consciousness, an inner world built from the assimilation of nature, memory, and dreams. In 2020, the series continued onto nine larger square panels that held the potentialities of fire and flood, the most delicate of springs and the starkest of winters—an increasingly volatile yet urgently beautiful world. Giant evergreens stand aside, holding back the curtains, unveiling a pageant of color and emotion that emanates from the inseparable vibrations of nature and human life.
Laura Wooten
October 2020
