This painting began with recollecting my time at the Continental Divide in Colorado, where I spent my summers during college. There is NOTHING like the sky and mountains of Colorado to me. During COVID lockdown, my heart reached back in time to my summers of climbing and horseback riding in the Rockies, under that vast sky.
My abstracted mountain paintings reference a real place, to begin with, but I evolve the final artwork into someplace new. My work is more about creating a feeling than a replication. I work with colors that are not realistic because I am fascinated with the science behind how our brains perceive value before color and take this as a creative challenge. My paintings read the same in black and white because the values of my selected colors define shadow and light, creating a form that your brain recognizes. There is an excellent article about this from a doctor at Stanford. It blows my mind.
To create Altitude Shift, I began with a section of the Continental Divide. I reversed the profile and squeezed it to dramatize the mountains, which emphasized the forms. I selected a cheery color palette based on tones and set to work! I tend to add a subliminal message of LOVE into my work because, at the end of the day, this is the basis for everything, and now more than ever, I want to send this out into the world. In Altitude Shift, it is written repeatedly in the lower layers of the deep blue bottom section. You may be able to make out a letter or two, but without knowing this tidbit, you will not see it.
