47″ x 50″
LOOKING DOWN ON EASTERN OREGON
When seeing the landscape from the air, you are no longer concerned about traditional space and composition. Your view is a matter of patterning directly below and the distant terrain is without true elevation. You lose the sense of height of trees and mountains and buildings, and instead you now see geologic formations, cities as maps, and forests as botanical plans. And because you are looking straight down, there is no need to be controlled by the horizon, which normally helps to position things in distance and space. So you resort to creating the illusion of space by exaggerating the intensity of color.
One of the interesting advantages from this point of view is that distant shadows become blue and purple, which in traditional landscapes is the color the sky as negative space. But these colors, in richer hues, can now become positive space, so all distances are ambiguous giving you a dynamic sense of movement.
The bottom of this painting has more clarity and its shape is enclosed by the airplaneʼs window while the atmospheric and far away terrain opens up as expanding curved shapes at the top of the painting. The balancing act here was to successfully unify the composition, when there are numerous points of perspective.