The Bigger Picture

I love to paint in series because I also love to decorate.

When we decorate our homes, we are individualizing the spaces. We are showcasing the quality of our taste, and taking up space. This can often mean needing more than one piece of art.

Think of it like this: Where do you put your favourite pieces of art? They don’t end up in our bedrooms or our bathrooms. We put them in spaces where we can see them most often like our offices and living rooms. A living room wall can be huge, and one small painting can easily get swallowed up by that space. 

I want to create art that allows people to fill the wide open walls. If I can create a coordinated group of paintings - not matching or identical - they can take up space together and enhance the room where they live. The paintings can collaborate and add to the design of a space. 

Painting with the Seasons

I am a seasonal painter, and this is where a lot of my series work is created from. 

For every seasonal collection, I paint two or three different series within. Typically, each series includes two or three paintings, and it all starts with colour.

I use the same basic colours in my series, and then I paint each piece one after the other. I may pick a palette for each series, or for the entire seasonal collection. For example, this past winter I painted the Frozen Waterfall series in only pastels. 

Typically, I’ll use the same size and shape of canvas for each piece in a series, but every now and then it feels right to mix and match. Depending on how I want to paint the landscape, showcasing different elements, it might make sense to use different sized canvases within a series.

This is how my brain works. I almost never envision my art in one-off terms and I can never seem to capture everything I need to on a single canvas. I’m not sure if it’s because the landscapes are bigger than me and my ideas, or if it’s just that this is where I’m at within my practice.

The bottom line is that I really enjoy painting in series, and my collectors seem to like them too.