Displaying items by tag: utah landscapes
G. Russell Case
Utah painter G. Russell Case is deeply invested in the mysteries of simplicity, and his native landscape has provided him with an impressive laboratory. “How you go about simplifying is one of the hardest things about painting,” he acknowledges. “It’s like a novel. You have your main character, and then your supporting characters, and after that the more stuff you put in, the more distracting it gets.” In painting, each brush stroke or compositional element signifies a host of conscious and unconscious decisions, and each precludes a host of other possibilities. Drawing just enough of the right detail from the landscape is fraught with enough opportunities to wreck a whole day’s work. “What I like is when I come upon a scene so simple that I actually have to add interest back in,” he laughs. “The point of simplicity is to let the idea come through the landscape.”
