Oak and Lupine Acrylic/Canvas 47X41"

Sand Verbena Acrylic/Canvas 47X44"

Valley View Acrylic/Canvas 47X 41"

The varied forms and colors of the landscape continue to renew my landscape painting. I am drawn to vivid color and motion and always paint to represent this on canvas. When someone says they see grasses of my meadow paintings move in the breeze, I feel I have achieved a painting that works to convey my intentions.

I was raised in the Cumberland River valley in Harlan, County, Kentucky. This is a landscape of mountains racked and riddled with coalmines and dark green hollows. My first color memory was of baskets of red tomatoes stacked around my crib. The influence of this early memory has shaped my artistic vocabulary and become my current work.

After following a black bear in to what I later discovered was Crex Meadow, a wild life refuge in Northwestern Wisconsin, I began painting meadows. The meadow is written in a code I keep trying to decipher. It is elusive and profound.

I respond to color on the landscape and a high horizon line within the opportunities it affords to explore the flow of the land and the wind and light across it.

I build my landscapes slowly using many layers of vivid transparent acrylic paint on white canvas. This process results in a depth of glowing color, that changes light and creates motion. The end result becomes 3-dimensional and the landscape moves with the wind.

Photo Credit: Peggy Sue Howard