Revealing and Concealing the Landscape Through Mixed-Media Painting: How Fog, Layers and Memory Shape My Process
Fog changes everything.
A familiar shoreline can disappear in minutes. Mountains become silhouettes, islands seem to float without edges, and places I know well suddenly feel mysterious and slightly unsettled.
I spend a lot of time in two coastal landscapes where fog is almost a presence of its own: Mount Desert Island in Maine and Sausalito and the Marin Headlands in California. In Maine, fog can soften granite, erase distant islands and turn the coast into a series of pale shapes. In Sausalito, it spills over the hills and across the Golden Gate, revealing and concealing the landscape almost by the minute.
I think that constant shifting between what is visible and what is hidden has become part of the way I paint.
My paintings are not really attempts to reproduce a particular view. They are more about what remains after I leave a place: the light, the weather, the shapes I remember, and sometimes the things I am not completely sure I saw at all.
Painting Fog Without Really Painting Fog
What interests me most about fog is not the fog itself. It is what fog does to a landscape.
Details disappear. Edges soften. Distance becomes uncertain. A complicated view can suddenly be reduced to a few shapes, shifts in value and fragments of color.
That is very close to what I am trying to do in my abstract landscape paintings.
Instead of painting a literal cloud of fog, I often build an image and then partially obscure it. I may cover a strong shape with translucent paint, soften an edge, roll a thin veil of color over an area, or scrape back through a surface I painted earlier.
Sometimes the most interesting part of a painting is the thing you can barely see.
That process is especially important in my Atmospheric Memory paintings, where weather, light and memory can become just as important as the physical landscape.
Building a Painting by Covering It Up
One of the stranger parts of painting is that I can spend hours making something I like and then deliberately cover it.
It took me a long time to become comfortable with that.
Now I think those buried layers are essential. Even when they are no longer fully visible, they affect everything above them. A fragment of orange may glow through a thin blue layer. A piece of painted paper may leave an unexpected ridge. A dark shape may remain just visible enough to suggest rock, forest or distant land.
I use acrylic, oil and cold wax, along with hand-painted and recycled collage papers. I also use rollers, wedges, torn paper and assorted tools that were never designed to make paintings.
The physical process matters to me: adding, covering, scraping, tearing, rolling and uncovering. I would rather let a painting develop through that back-and-forth than force it toward an image I had already decided on.
You can see more of that process in my post about mixed-media landscape paintings inspired by Maine, Acadia and wild places.
Memory Is Less Precise—and More Interesting—Than a Photograph
I use photographs as references, but I do not want the finished painting to behave like a photograph.
Memory is much less reliable, and I think that makes it more interesting.
When I remember a place, I rarely remember every tree, rock or building. I remember a particular light. A dark mass against the sky. The color of water before a storm. The way a mountain vanished into cloud.
Memory edits. It simplifies some things and exaggerates others. Sometimes I cannot even say exactly which landscape has found its way into a painting. A shape may feel like Mount Desert Island, while the atmosphere reminds me of the Marin Headlands. Fog, water, rock, hills and changing light begin to overlap.
I like that ambiguity. I am not trying to document geography. I am trying to get closer to the experience of being in the landscape.
That is one reason abstraction feels so natural to me. My coastal abstract paintings may suggest shoreline, horizon, water or stone, but I do not want them to tell viewers exactly where they are.
The Landscape Appears, Disappears and Appears Again
My paintings often go through a stage where I feel as if I have lost the landscape completely.
I used to panic when that happened. Now I usually consider it a good sign.
If everything remains obvious from beginning to end, the painting can become too predictable. I am more interested in letting the image disappear for a while and then finding it again.
Sometimes that means removing paint instead of adding it. I scrape through a surface, tear away collage paper, sand an area or drag a tool through wet paint. Those actions reveal fragments of earlier decisions.
It often reminds me of watching fog move through a landscape.
Something that was invisible appears. Something else disappears.
The painting keeps changing depending on what I choose to reveal and what I allow to remain hidden.
Maine, Sausalito and the Landscapes We Carry With Us
Mount Desert Island and Sausalito are very different places, but I am drawn to many of the same things in both: water, shifting weather, rock, distant landforms and dramatic changes in light.
Fog connects them in an especially interesting way. In Acadia, it can make the coastline feel ancient and isolated. In the Marin Headlands, it can pour over the hills and transform a familiar view into something almost abstract.
Those experiences stay with me long after I leave.
When I return to the studio, I am not necessarily painting what I saw. I am painting what I remember—and memory has already begun rearranging things.
That overlap between Maine and California has become increasingly important in my work. One landscape can slip into another. A painting may begin with one place and end up belonging to neither.
Leaving Space for the Viewer
I do not want to explain every inch of a painting.
Part of what attracts me to artists working between abstraction and landscape is their willingness to leave things unresolved. I wrote more about some of those influences in 6 Artists Who Influence My Abstract Landscape Painting.
A recognizable landscape tells us where we are.
An abstract landscape can do something different: it can make us wonder where we are.
That uncertainty interests me much more.
When someone tells me that one of my paintings reminds them of a coast, a mountain, a marsh or some place from their childhood that I have never visited, I do not think they have misunderstood the work.
I think the painting is doing exactly what I hope it will do.
The landscape becomes less about one specific location and more about memory, recognition and feeling.
And perhaps that is why I keep coming back to fog.
It reminds me that we do not have to see everything clearly for a place to stay with us.
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