Todd Carpenter

Muddle

2021

The Last Landscape, 2020

Retreat, 2019

"One Of The Ways" depicts a densely populated grove. As with other of Carpenter's paintings, this scene invites viewers to look closer and also to go out to explore nature. As a painter, I examine how the depiction of light contributes to our experience of paintings. The portrayal of light helps a painting to convey the atmosphere and mood of a scene, and is much of what enables a painting to convey depth and realism. Our perception of lighting features occurs largely through pathways in the brain that carry only black and white information, pathways which are distinct from areas that encode the colors and details we use to delineate specific objects. By painting in grayscale, I try to interact specifically with this region of our visual system, with the hope of conveying some of the spaciousness and emotional significance that light can imbue on scenes. Light, whether as the crisp contrast of a back-lit forest or the gray haze of an industrial landscape, is what defines a scene. Its power to communicate the feel of a place is the principle subject of my paintings. The Blue Azul Collection...

oil on canvas b. 1951, Nagasaki, Japan Neoromantic painter Hiro Yokose fuses multiple layers of wax and oil paint to create mysterious, veiled landscapes illuminated with flashes o...