Short Mountain, Early Spring    Oil on Canvas    

 48" X 72"

Exuberant Fall Oil on Canvas

 50" X 72"

Haldeman State Forest, Winter Oil on Canvas 

48" X 60"

         I paint large-scale landscapes paintings on location - mostly densely wooded landscapes in state forests, game lands, and other locations. The scale and physicality of the painting allows the viewer to feel they can step into the painting. I have often times painted on the same spot over and over for the past twenty years. part of the truth of paining for me is seeing how I can paint the same thing differently instead of different things the same way. The large oils are worked for a period of one to two months. the use of horizontal format, shifting focal points, and a kind of tempo or pacing through the canvas are various element incorporated in the pictorial structure of the paintings.

I try to capture the character of the light at a given time and place with the specific atmospheric quality of the moment. I like how light comes across a landscape to make a planar space, which conveys a unique characteristic of that place. Its immediacy and unpredictability seem to be always in a state of movement and change which is its true beauty. I look for intriguing shapes, patterns, and rhythms lurking in the ordinary. The choice of a particular motif is derived from the way the visual elements clarify and epitomize the sense of feelings of space. Working directly in the landscape develops keenly my sense of the tinerrelationshi0ps of objects, their shapes, and surfaces so that the seemingly simple reveals its great complexity.

Johnson Hom

June 2005