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Copyright © 2003 Rona Conti
Landscapes on PaperMountains, Sea, ForestsThe smallish landscapes and seascapes you are viewing are gentle companions to the more robust abstract paintings and handmade paper works represented on this website. They were all painted outdoors in the manner of the many artists who work on site, welcoming the changes of light and seasons, and skirting around insects and approaching storms. The venues range from Cape Cod to Maine, from Gunma Prefecture in the Japan Alps to the monasteries of KoyaSan in the mountains of Wakayama Prefecture. The smell and feeling of the pine forests of Maine welcomed me each summer as my parents and siblings traveled from Baltimore to a summer camp where my parents worked in the Lakes Region. We reaped the benefits of their labors by being campers, away from the heat of the city and able to indulge in pleasurable activities while learning... priviledged summers of fencing, archery, arts and crafts, and being on water...canoeing, water skiing, and just sitting quietly and looking. I have carried these pleasures with me throughout my life and found my Maine mountains in Japan when I first spent a year there in 1998. Subsequent trips found me gazing with amazement at the layered mountains, one behind the other receding to infinity, but flat and two dimensional, just like the woodblock prints I loved to view at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. I thought they were stylized until I saw for myself the landscape as it is, bands of tiny graceful trees at the top of the mountains, like delicate grey lace topping. Being outdoors, with the sun or shadow on me, watching the colors drying and transforming, deriving joy in the process and not worrying about the image, just being there ... so very different from being in my studio, I would later select and discard works I deemed unsatisfactory. I once tried to paint landscapes in my studio from photographs and memories, but without being outdoors, I was totally uninspired, and the artwork was likewise, and thus appropriately and quickly abandoned. The paintings you are viewing are personal and intimate. They hang on my walls, I live with them and enjoy them, and I see my KoyaSan, my Maine, my Three Trees, my Marstons Pond with Elusive Moose, with its' undulating reeds, its' three rocks, and its' expansive background of seemingly impenetrable forest. I offer these paintings as a gesture of the simple beauty of places which inspire, soothe, delight and awe me. I hope that you will find in these paintings places which you have also loved. |