Penny Ross
pross@ptd.net

Artist's Statement

I make my landscape paintings outdoors, and they are my immediate response to what I am seeing and feeling. Each painting is as close as possible to the experience of being there.

I try to interpret the place, the season, the time of day, and allow the moment to speak for itself through me. The painting might turn out to be saturated with excitement - the movement of water over rocks in a stream, the vivid green of a meadow; or it might breathe peacefulness - a seascape in the thin light of morning, a hillside muffled in snow.

I find myself returning again and again to the same subjects. There are particular place I love: a dark red barn in a field, a certain hill in the chartreuse green of spring, a stream in the woods with its ancient rocks like anchors to the earth. I paint these places over and over: the atmosphere and the light can reveal them in a hundred different ways.

Sometimes I make still-life paintings, especially of flowers. I have my favorites - tulips, poppies- and paint them again year after year. A bouquet in a vase is an old subject, but I seek to find a new way of saying something about each year's flowers, in this vase, in this light, on this day, much as a poet writes sonnet after sonnet, each a new poem within the familiar shape.

My work is changing with time Now I am focussing especially on the values of "dark Light," and on saturated color. I'm also becoming more aware of subtleties that I didn't recognize when I was younger.

As time goes on I see the same thing in a different way, and this continues to amaze me.