Hudson Valley - Capitol District
Altamont Hedgerow 46”x70” oil on canvas
The Capitol District region of the Hudson River Valley is where I was raised. With a young weather eye toward its intriguing landscape, I scouted the Hudson River’s embankments and numerous tributaries, and discovered some truly consummate places: Beginning with the Hamlet of Guilderland Center, where as an adolescent I became fascinated and comfortable in nature—routinely roaming my grandfather’s farmland fields and hollows bordered by the Normanskill Creek. Eventually, I would be painting there. Other associations included the NY Capitol City of downtown Albany; the luminous Eastern profile of the Catskill Mountains; the wild Adirondacks to the North; and the theatrical Confluence of the Hudson and Mohawk Rivers. All these places amplified a call for taking on a reputable art practice.
My very first independent studio in Albany was thrilling—having light-filled rooms and motivation for consistent art production with the city below. The studio was located a dozen blocks from a largely abandoned and mysterious collection of early Dutch-brick buildings, known as The Pastures—a content-laden place where I would be drawing and painting on-location for two years. Historians planning a reconstruction of the site saw what I was up to artistically, and hired me to draw my own personal interpretation of a restored Pastures. The scope of visualizations expanded with added commissions for rendering major Capitol Restoration projects. It was the Pastures however that initially drew me to Albany, after confronting its astonishingly tragic and haunted state of decline. Looking deeper, surely I found the vicinity to be unsound, but it was bewitching—a contradiction I enjoyed bringing to the work. I was determined to artfully appropriate the Pasture’s dramatic and graphic conditions before it disappeared. The scope of the goal encompassed more than a hundred drawings and paintings on paper.
Moving westward from the Capitol, the allure of Schoharie Valley was a perfect place to settle with a young family—in our first house and the rehabbing of an out-building for a studio. A decade’s-worth of daily rambles with palette-loaded pigments over countless fertile acres was profoundly satisfying. Occasional excursions back across the Hudson to Historic Olana became an additional pursuit, where working there could not happen often enough. Annual requests for my paintings to be represented in Olana’s Summer auctions were foundational milestones for building a career in art.
The Capitol District was more than a homeland, but a domain of various and notable locations which I embraced over time, to be transformed through painting. Spirited ideas of form, outline and color were perceptions and emotions imbedded in my work. Fervent in practice, my art became prominent in the area, and I felt I had a role to play—sharing degrees of visual importance and beauty with people of that venerable region.
