One night in 2011 I came home from a troubling day out in the world and started trying to describe what I was feeling in the language of my art. It was a way to blow off steam. What is the language of my art? Simple… Rocks, Water, Trees and Sky. That pretty much covers it. Landscape painting has been the focus of my art since I came back to California in 1997. As a young boy I would feel a sense of awe at being outdoors in an open landscape. I would feel compelled to do something with that emotion, to express it in some way, but I did not know how. These days landscape painting is how I express that sense of awe… my way of interacting with it. As a painter I feel lucky to live in such a rich natural environment.

For me 2011 was decent enough year. I had a job I loved doing, a nice girlfriend and I enjoyed volunteering a portion of my time to the city as an Arts Commissioner. It was a year however that seemed to be a year for worry. It felt to me that the whole world was pretty much in that mode, the worry mode. On that particular night I was feeling right there with everyone else. The path forward seemed a little scary. So I started to draw a picture of that path. As I was working I was thinking of the knife-edge ridge of Castle Craigs that runs south form Chris Bonington’s Cosmic Wall. I also thought of the south summit ridge of Mt. Everest, where the cornices seem to rise above you and bare their teeth as you approach from below. That seems like scary territory to me and it was just the metaphor I was looking for.

The foreground thrusts out in front of you just as the south summit of Everest does and presents the way forward, up, steep and slippery. At the top I added the trees clinging to the side of the ridge, a symbol for the worry I was feeling at the time. The trees serve several purposes for me. They help denote scale, they also help pinpoint the location. These are the Juniper trees that one sees in northern California. The main point of the trees however is that they represent the struggle that is the cause of the worry that I was trying to articulate. They are ascending the ridge, bent from the wind and silent in their journey as they toil against the elements. The fog and mist is blown through a gap in the middle hiding then showing the towers that present the way forward. The ridge meets up with the summit headwall on the other side and all angles point out to an unseen future. As I worked I wondered if I could paint uncertainty.

The drawing took about thirty minutes and by the time I finished it I had slipped out of the worry mode into a frame of mind I can’t even remember. I was intrigued by the drawing and decided to make a painting from it, which took about a week. The size is 11×14. The medium is acrylic, which is the medium I feel most in control of. The title is The Hurricane Gap.

The path forward is always a question mark. In times of uncertainty that path can seem downright scary. Painting is one way for me to navigate that path… that and the knowledge that despite worry and fear the only way forward… is forward.

I set out to paint an emotion, to translate it, maybe even exorcise it into something else,
a metaphor for worry and uncertainty.

I wonder if that is what people will see when they look at this painting?