One day many years ago, my husband and I were in a book store, Raven Used Books in Northampton, and I came across Peter Brown’s On the Plains,  a magnificent book of large photographs, all taken in middle and western America, of grand landscapes and spacious skies. It’s become one of my favorite books to dream to. The sprawling scenes of immense horizons, for some reason, calm my mind and make me smile.

Throughout the years, I’ve looked at these pictures and thought of doing a series of landscapes, bringing together the beautiful simplicity of land and sky.

Finally, it is the end of 2011 and I have just started this series: Where Earth Meets Sky. The difference with these paintings will be the omission of wax. I don’t want the surface texture to take away from the piece. The sky has many layers of smoothed gesso and then treated in the end with a high gloss polymer. The grass, however is carved out of wet gesso and then dried, giving a little texture to the piece. Oils are used in layers of intense yellows and oranges with hints of brown and green.