Valley of Stone 1989

Ronnie Landfield made this painting, Valley of Stone, using washes of color like watercolor. It looks like he was out to capture the essence of a landscape through veils of tinted light. I can imagine Landfield layering the paint, moving between colours like orange, yellow, and blue. He might have been thinking about the tradition of landscape painting but trying to push it towards something more abstract and emotional. The colour bands at either side feel like he’s framing a memory, or maybe the feeling of a place, more than a realistic view. It reminds me a little of Helen Frankenthaler’s soak-stain paintings from the 1960s, where she poured thinned paint onto unprimed canvas. But Landfield’s got a thing of his own going on. There’s a dialogue here, an exchange of ideas across time. And that’s what painting’s all about for me – it’s an embodied expression of experience. The beauty of it is that there isn't just one way to see it.