I used to love painting everyday scenes the towns I live in and around. I tended to paint older, but not “historic” places. Frequently I would paint something - that I truly thought was beautiful - and it would be torn down. Once, I heard a woman who was showing my paintings in her shop say, “Sarah paints ugly places and makes them beautiful.” I was too polite to tell her that was not exactly right. I always thought these places were beautiful. It hurt me to see my subjects torn down and replaced by something new. A few times I tried to paint newly built places, and sometimes it worked out. But I can never paint something I think is ugly. When I choose a subject, it’s always because I love something about it.
Anyway, gradually, I got tired of painting by side of the road, with the car noises and the consequences of new meth filling streets with unpredictable people. So in the past few years, I find myself painting in more natural places. Places with obvious beauty. Which sometimes makes these subjects harder to paint. It’s really hard to do justice to an incredible mountain that formed over millions of years. My paintings pale in comparison.
Clear Cut at Vesper Meadow, , Sarah F. Burns, 2023, Oil on Panel, 16” x 20”
Take this painting of a clear cut. This painting was easy to make. I found this composition right away, I delighted in the using traditional European composition to heroicize these trees left standing on this ravaged acreage. So easy to design.
But try to paint Mount Shasta? From the incredible mountain meadows of Mount Ashland? I STRUGGLE. What angle can I take? It’s one of them most wonderful places I go! The European compositional strategies have been done. They seem trite and inadequate. And painting beautiful paintings of the west in that way is associated fallacies like manifest destiny. What I want to say from my 2024 vantage point is “Look how incredible this is. I can’t believe we have something so nice.” So, I’m giving it a go. I’m wading into murky waters.
Mt Shasta Sketch, from the Mt. Ashland ski area parking lot, en plein air. This is my source material for a larger painting I’m currently working on.
I made this plein air study last summer. Since then I’ve been working on a 40” x 48” studio piece based on this study, plus some photo references. I had hoped it would be complete by now. It’s not. I decided I need to go back to Mount Ashland this summer to observe some to the colors again to try to catch the vibrance without going garish. This is the first time I’ve made a landscape this large. And the subject is just so earnest! The process has been an emotional roller coaster. There were times this winter that I thought I had made a huge mistake - that the piece would be too embarrassing to exhibit. But, at the moment, I don’t hate it. I can see promise. There is a flicker of the joy of a sunny bumblebee-filled meadow, with springs trickling down and the vast layers of mountains fading into the blue. I just might pull it off! Still pale in comparison to the real thing, but it might actually say, “Look how incredible this place is.”
Come judge for yourself how it’s going. I am showing the Clear Cut, Mt. Shasta Sketch, and the unfinished studio landscape, along with three other pieces at Project Space in Talent this weekend, Saturday, May 4 from 4-7pm and Sunday, May 5 from 3-5pm.