The Shape of a Season

It begins long before we notice it. By the time the shift becomes visible, the process is already underway. The current has been pressing against one bank, depositing sediment along another, and making small adjustments long before the landscape reveals what has changed.

I've been thinking about that lately.

Over the past several months, a number of things have happened that, at first, seemed unrelated. Three paintings were selected for the Midwest edition of New American Paintings. Twilight's Indigo Breath was featured in Dispatch Culture and included in the Rockford Midwest Biennial. More recently, The Oxbow Holds the River's Memory was accepted into Art from the Heartland at the Indy (Indianapolis) Art Center.

At the time, each felt like its own moment. Looking back now, I can see connections that I didn't recognize at the time.

When the New American Paintings catalog arrived, I spent time looking at Glimpse of Rain, Ships in Passing, and Deluge (Deluge on August Ground) together on the page. The paintings had been made separately, over different stretches of time, but seeing them side by side revealed something I hadn't fully noticed while making them. They shared the same atmosphere and the same attention to weather, shifting light, and those moments when the landscape seems poised between stillness and change.

The surprise deepened when juror Stephanie Fox Knappe selected me as one of two Noteworthy Artists in the Midwest edition. In her remarks, she wrote about finding herself looking at rain differently afterward, paying closer attention to it and noticing aspects of it she might once have overlooked.

Most of us move through the world assuming we've already seen it. We know what rain looks like. We know what a horizon looks like. We know what happens when late afternoon light crosses a field.The landscape hasn't become ordinary. We've simply grown accustomed to it.

Or at least we think we do.

The longer I paint, the less interested I am in providing answers and the more interested I am in renewing attention. The work begins with looking closely enough that something familiar becomes unfamiliar again.

If a painting sends someone back into the world and causes them to pause the next time rain gathers on a windowpane or moves across an open field, then it has done something more than communicate an idea. It has become part of experience.

A similar feeling accompanied Twilight's Indigo Breath as it found its way into different contexts. The painting remained the same, yet each setting revealed something different. Nothing about the surface had changed. The paint was the same. The composition was the same. What changed was the person standing in front of it.
 

The painting remained the same. What changed was the person standing in front of it.

Looking back, I keep returning to the way these experiences have changed what I notice. Connections that were always present have become easier to recognize. Paintings made years apart now seem to belong to the same conversation.

This brings me to The Oxbow Holds the River's Memory.

Later this month, the painting will be included in Art from the Heartland at the Indy Art Center. I find myself drawn to the pairing. The exhibition title points to the Midwest, and the painting grew directly from my experience of a landscape shaped by rivers, weather, and time.

I've always been drawn to the idea of an oxbow, a former river channel left behind when the water finds a new path. The river moves on, but the landscape retains the shape of where it once flowed.

When I first titled the painting, I was thinking about rivers. Lately, I've found myself thinking about time.

The Oxbow Holds the River's Memory

An oxbow makes visible a change that has already occurred.

An oxbow makes visible a change that has already occurred. Once you recognize what you're looking at, you can't quite see the landscape in the same way again. What first appears to be an isolated curve of water becomes evidence of movement, time, and transformation.

Perhaps that is what has connected so many of these experiences for me. They have become their own kind of evidence, not of success or recognition, but of something that was already there.

Over the past several months, I've found myself recognizing similar patterns in the work and in my own experience. Connections that weren't obvious have become clear. Things that once appeared separate now seem related. What changed wasn't necessarily the work itself. What changed was my ability to see it.

Reality had already shifted. My perception was simply catching up.

A river doesn't change course all at once. The shift begins long before it becomes visible. Perhaps we recognize the shape of a season the same way we recognize an oxbow, only after the water has gone elsewhere.