I enjoy the outdoors—plein-air painting is a lot about surviving the
elements. Feeling the heat or cold, the bugs, the wind, all somehow
become translated into the paintings. I also work in the studio, but
all my work is based on time I have spent outside.
Keeping
my work fresh, I have found, is a challenge. I often worry that it will
be hard to continue to be a landscape painter in a place where you have
lived and worked all your life. But I have found that what used to seem
to be a limited resource is, in fact, quite limitless. The more I
paint, the more options for paintings are opened up. While I am
constantly looking for new motifs to paint, I have also noticed that
working from the same places over and over again has infinite
possibilities--in that the light changes throughout the day, as well as
throughout the year, and offers endless subtle changes in mood and
personality.
I find myself
reexamining many things that I have worked already or passed by in
times past and finding that there is something there that I didn’t see
or maybe was not capable of expressing before. I find it very
interesting to try to understand what it is about a place that causes
me to stop and paint. For the most part, I stop because I like what I
am looking at, or there is a certain color that jumps out at me. I also
believe that there is a certain geometry and or rhythm that may be some
of the underlying influences.
As
I strive to move forward in my work I am trying to understand and
express these things. I am constantly looking for the balance between
the abstract quality of a satisfying paint stroke verses the
accumulation of paint strokes that add up the visual expression and
hopefully then to some kind of an emotional experience for who ever
stops to look.
Doug Braithwaite received his Bachelors of Fine Art from the University
of Utah in 1991. His work currently shows in galleries throughout the
United States from New York to California.
Braithwaite
has taught landscape painting and figure through the University of Utah
and privately since 1991.
