Lady in Red

5″x5″ oil on gesso-coated board

This piece is available. Email me at CokerArt@yahoo.com for price.

“Artists are just children who refuse to put down their crayons.”  -Al Hirschfeld, 1903-2003

It’s been a cold winter here in Georgia so far. Okay, you folks in Chicago or Fargo would beg to differ, I’m sure. Everything is relative. Today, I took my camera and small sketchpad and ventured outside into the surrounding woods. I love the outdoors in winter. It trills me to walk in the woods with leaves, limbs and the cold ground crunching under foot. My deepest emotions are stirred along with a driving need to express them. I love to sit and sketch details of trees and photograph their many shapes and angles, absorbing to memory their very essence. I would much rather paint the bare, sculptural trees of winter than all the clumps of green trees in the summer combined. To me, there’s something intensely emotional about the winter landscape. I’ve never quite been able to put my finger on it. I’ve spent the majority of my life in the South, with the exception of a few years spent in southern Germany, Florida and Montana. There’s a quiet starkness that reaches deep into my soul and makes me want to capture its fleeting imagery. The air smells richer and your lungs have no trouble feeling the impact of the cold air when you inhale. It’s cleansing, ironically, like a summer rain.

I love the way the sunlight trickles over a gray, winter tree, exposing its skin, warts and all. I love to visit the same trees in different times of day to see how the changing light recasts new shadows every little while, altering the personality of the tree. I want to get as close as I can to see the crags and cuts of years of standing against winters and hot, Southern summers, to see the clinging vines of wisteria that have embedded themselves into the body of the tree. As a painter, I try so hard to stay loose and painterly, but when it comes to the detail in those winter trees, it’s all but impossible for me not to paint every nook  and cranny. I never tire of looking at those same trees I have looked at, drawn and painted for the 20 years since we built our home. Andrew Wyeth once put it this way: “You can look at the same object in all times of day or in your imagination with the myriad shifts of tones. It’s like Rembrandt painting his own face as many times as he did. A change of subject is really very unimportant to me, because there are always new revelations coming out of that one subject.” I will share some of my tree friends with you soon. Stay tuned. Enjoy!