The River Crossing

Using Painting Knives in Landscape Painting - A Step-by-Step Reveal

I am often roaming the countryside and the country itself, looking for landscape inspirations. It’s a great job. When I bought my first car, an Austin-Healey Sprite, I drove that fun, but horribly unreliable thing, all over the back roads around Kansas City and beyond. I loved to explore and see new places—had an unquenchable thirst for it—still do. But my art practice didn’t shift to landscape painting until a decade or so later, when I was living on the incredibly scenic Hudson River, right across that river from West Point Military Academy. My studio then was in a New York Central train station which had been a movie set in Barbra Streisand’s 1969 film, Hello Dolly. It sat on a park on the edge of the river. Each day, as I created art for book covers and magazines (remember those?), I looked out my windows at the river, longing to be Out There. So, one day I quit that work and went outdoors to really learn how to paint. I never looked back.

Fast forward 1200 miles and forty-two year…