"So what am I thinking about when I’m out here in the wind and the sun and the fresh air? I assume that most painters would be explaining their painting process in terms that you read about all the time. Light, value, color hue, composition. Frankly, I’m not sure what any of those mean really. To me they are words for describing a painting after the fact and fall short of explaining what good painting is all about. Take the work of John Marin and Tom Thompson, two of the greatest landscape painters of the modern age. You could hardly say that their work follows the rules that are being taught in the countless plein air painting workshops around the country today. I rather think of good painting in terms of emotion, feeling, weight, poetry.
Walking the shore here the last couple days I see the lake as the base of everything around it. The lake has a weight. It is constantly seeking its own level and establishes the majority of the horizon in sight. The land, a continuing line of points, bays, inlets and long shores meet the lake. They reach to the shore like animals coming to drink.(No wonder the native people created so many animals legends of the area) And on top of everything is the vast sky,ever changing,a shifting,passing stew of clouds and color, never static ,never the same. This is what I’m seeing and thinking about. Certainly I have to use the physical qualities of the paint, the differing values of color and I have to think about fitting(composition) this paint onto a shape of canvas but I think its more important to think about how that big body of water could swallow me up in a blink of an eye."
Richard Kooyman