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Sunday, August 4, 2019

Musing on my emotional response to the landscape

Reykjavik, Iceland

I've spent hundreds of hours painting the landscape on location.  Early on it was a pursuit to make my painting look like the subject.  There was so much to take in and all the while the light, tones and colors were changing; so many details I had to get down to copy the scene.  Although stressful, it forced me to respond intuitively.  Over the years, this intuition has become the stronger force in my work pulling me to capture the feeling of the scene rather than simply its likeness.  Now I ponder the success of my painting by the connection I had with the scene and how I communicated my emotional response to it rather than my ability to match the scene color for color, tone for tone.  These are the paintings that take me back to that place where I can hear the birds chattering at one another and the squirrel barking an alert of the fox slinking through the tall grasses.  I can once again feel the heat of the radiating sun drawing beads of sweat from my skin and then suddenly the respite of cool shade courtesy of the sole cloud passing in front of it.

Scott Ruthven

Painting Reykjavik Harbor - Scott Ruthven