It is the form the idea takes in the imagination rather than the form as it exists outside.

–Arthur Dove

I’m in the middle of working on a large group of new work for my upcoming solo shows. At such times I am always looking for a groove where the work flows easily and in one direction, like a river. But sometimes the groove begins to feel more like tunnel than a river, constricted and with no chance of overrunning its banks and expanding its scope. At such times, I find it’s sometimes good to pull back and examine earlier work and the work of those who influenced it.

When I was first starting to paint, one of the artists whose work I looked to for inspiration was the Modernist painter Arthur Dove, 1880-1946. It was the way in which he merged abstraction with representation and his use of recurring elements in his work that drew me in. Even now, when I look at the ball/circle shape that I use so often as my sun/moon I think of some of Dove’s paintings. My upcoming show has many so Dove has been on my mind lately.

I was also attracted to his work since we were both from the Finger Lakes region, Dove born and raised in Canandaigua and educated at nearby Cornell. The idea that we both experienced many of the same landscapes growing up made me want to look closer at his work. Like the Lawrence Durrell passage I quoted last week, I believe “we are children of our landscape” and examining the work of an artist shaped by a similar landscape is always intriguing, seeing how the forms they take in are transformed within the artist’s imagination.

There is sometimes commonality, which might be viewed as reinforcing, but more often there are much different takes on the common landscape. And that is actually more inspiring and influencing as it allows me to take a different perspective on a landscape I know. It opens the mind a bit. And that’s what you’re looking for in your influences, the work that pushes you forward.

Though there is not a lot of writing from Dove, there are a couple of other Dove quotes that mesh well with my own viewpoint on painting:

I look at nature, I see myself. Paintings are mirrors, so is nature.

and this one, which has appeared here in the past:

We cannot express the light in nature because we have not the sun. We can only express the light we have in ourselves.

Here’s a video of Dove’s work that I shared here several years ago.