Emblems Of Love

Usually, when I visit my parents in Santa Barbara, California, I also set up my easel and make a painting in their yard. They have cultivated a garden and take care of their corner lot, with its giant pine trees, orange and lemon trees, and tall hedge that guards the perimeter of the property. The last time I spoke with my mother and talked about her beloved rose plants, she said, “Oh yes, they are beginning to bloom. You know Steven, I have eighty rose bushes and they each have at least ten flowers . . . that is 800 flowers!” 

   

I know the yard well—and all the varieties of color and scent of her roses. She has a special relationship with the plant life around her, and holds conversations with the growing things that exist in her surroundings. 

Although my parents are advanced in age and becoming frail, they take deep satisfaction in their surroundings. The bird feeder outside the dining room window is replenished, a man comes regularly to mow the lawn and trim the hedges, and my mother prays every day in thanks for the elements and nature around her.

I know that the jasmine outside their backdoor is now finishing its bloom. Its unmistakable fragrance is etched in my memory.

Hopefully, I can arrive there again in the next few months . . . and make another painting. I always call it “Mother's Backyard” and after I bring it back to Santa Fe, it always sells to someone who finds emblems of love within it.

"Mother's Backyard"   oil on linen,   16 x 20 inches

Groundbreaking

Paul Cezanne, (French: January 19, 1839 - October 22, 1906)

Pablo Picasso, (Spanish:  25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973)

In the pursuit of artistic creativity, it often occurs that an artist is influenced by his peers, and by art history. Even when someone does something radical and new, essentially, a groundwork has been laid by others that allows this new breakthrough to occur. For instance, Picasso was a seminal figure in art in the twentieth century, and when his cubist paintings emerged, they shattered the barriers for art. And yet, these paintings did not appear in a vacuum, for Picasso had been a great admirer of Paul Cezanne, who years earlier had been taking impressionist painting into new territory with his careful constructing of picture planes using basic shapes of cones, rectangles and squares.

Claude Monet, (French: 14 November 1840 – 5 December 1926)

The crucial quality of groundbreaking artists, is their fearless pursuit of new ways of seeing, and their willingness to take risk and break from the crowd. Another great innovator of the twentieth century was Georges Seurat, who developed his signature style of painting, called pointillism, using uniform sized dots of color to make a depiction from nature. Yet, Seurat was keenly aware of the work of the impressionists, who had broken with traditional painting styles when they went from depicting stories in their paintings, into painting light itself.

Georges Pierre Seurat, (French: 2 December 1859 – 29 March 1891)

Piet Mondrian, (Dutch, March 7, 1872 – February 1, 1944)

Steven Boone, (American: 13 May 1952 - present.)

The Dutchman Piet Mondrian, migrated to Paris during the time Paris was the art capital of the world, when Picasso and a slew of other famous artists were there. Mondrian developed a highly refined abstract style of his own, which broke the picture plane down into a grid of horizontal and vertical bisecting lines, using some of the resulting  shapes to carefully be filled with primary colors. Many years later, I hearkened back to Mondrian in my street photography, when I captured images that resembled Mondrian's abstracts, using a lens instead of brush and paint.