Purple Woods, oil on canvas, 40 x 40 in.

Purple Woods

Oil on canvas, 40 x 40 inches

Exhibiting: Sorelle Gallery, Westport, Connecticut

$6650 framed

About this oil: One of the many pleasures of being a landscape artist is that you can rearrange nature as you please. Even more pleasurable is the facility for being a colorist and in this case, once I decided purple would be the primary color, I stepped into a completely new world. This is a forest that never existed before, but looks familiar and believable.

There's a strong compositional design at work with the wall of trees in the back, and that curtain is like a stage set, creating an open foreground that invites you in rather than stopping you at the tree line. I opted for a strip of light at the top and a yellow band at the bottom, enhancing the depth of the piece.

Beyond the basic composition, everything in the painting is an arrangement that contributes to an elegant view through the slender trees with their abstracted foliage. Nature doesn't actually look like this, it’s too tangled, too busy. But clear all the twigs and brambles and you get what remains, a quiet, open forest where a soft, purple light permeates everything.

A purple forest that never was, but once you've seen it, it's hard to imagine it not existing.