Painting outdoors asks me to look beyond the names of things. A tree is also a dark shape against a pale sky. A hillside becomes a meeting of warm and cool color.
Plein-air and representational painting remain part of my practice. Abstraction gives me another way to explore those same relationships. Without a recognizable subject, I pay closer attention to what the color and shapes are doing. Where does an edge disappear? What draws the eye across an open space? How much detail is enough?
These questions connect the work, even when the finished paintings look very different.
An abstract passage might suggest distance, weather, or movement without describing a particular place. I can follow that suggestion without turning it into a landscape. Sometimes making it recognizable would narrow what interests me about it.
Working this way gives observation somewhere else to go. What I notice outdoors becomes part of a visual vocabulary I can use freely in the studio.
The subject may change, but the habit of looking stays.
