News & Upcoming Events

Muse’s Memory - One Man Show - Mark Sublette Medicine Man Gallery, Tucson, Arizona

Through May 24, 2024

“You’ll never be able to paint all the good ideas you see” is a common lament among landscape painters, and an unfortunate truth of the profession. Nature is truly abundant when it comes to providing inspiration. The artist’s muse guides the choice of what, out of the vast variety of possibilities, will end up on the canvas that day. As the years roll past and the sketches, photos, and field studies accumulate in the studio, they are mostly forgotten from day to day as the plein-air painter ventures forth in search of new inspiration and fresh views. These stacks of drawings and paintings become what I think of as the “muse’s memory” – a library of ideas, a record of technique, and a rich source of information that frequently informs studio work.

Work on my book Afterimages took me on a deep dive into my muse’s memory in search of unfinished field studies for that project, and that process had an unexpected side effect: it reacquainted me with other ideas I had long wanted to develop further but had forgotten. I felt the same thrill upon seeing these ideas as I had felt in the moment of inspiration years before, and the prospect of developing them to their full potential was tremendously exciting. This exhibition is a sampling of those ideas, which, like old friends reunited after a long parting, it has been a distinct pleasure to revisit.