Mississippi Memories

 

I'm starting the new year with one of the paintings I finished by the end of last year - an early (summer) evening view of the Mississippi river in Alma Wisconsin. The inspiration was found on a balmy July night.
As long as I remember I have always been attracted by water, be it the sea, rivers, lakes or brooks. Being born in Holland, you're never really far from water, but as it happens I was born and lived in Rotterdam for an important part of my life and there the river is a very vital part of town. Living on the south side you always had to cross the river to get into downtown so there were always bridges that opened and made you wait among throngs of fellow bicyclists, watching the boats go by.There are many, many memories of river views stored on my visual hard drive yet I have done very few river view paintings. None in fact! It always seemed too obvious as a subject, endangered of ending up being a 'pretty/lovely' or kitschy sort of painting, something to be avoided at ALL times. Yet, somehow at this time in life I seem to have developed the tools with which to paint my experiences without falling into the pretty/lovely trap.
Being a painter of "less is more", much has been edited out of this landscape in order to abstract it, but I kept the vertical "signs" of the smoke stacks of Alma's power plant and also the floating buoys that mark the swimming pool area. Somehow that takes away any possible sweetness that still might lurk in this sunset scene.

The painting is in oil on linen and measures 24"x48"