Contact George Strickland

My favorite subjects are landscapes and seascapes. I love the many moods of nature and painting it connects me in a very spiritual way. A secondary inspiration for painting is the paint itself. To me, paint, especially oil, has a beauty that stands on its own. Juicy strokes on a canvas combined with techniques such as layering, dry brush and colors painted wet into other colors can be very sensuous. I want my paintings to look like paint, but paint that also looks like something else. When I am out in the field looking for a place to set up my easel, I am looking for a scene that I can visualize as paint. By making myself see it as paint, the visual qualities such as contrast, color, patterns, edges, textures and shapes become my focus. If there is a theme or concept in my painting, it is about one or sometimes two of these visual qualities. I believe some of the most beautiful paintings on this earth are not just paintings of things but more profoundly, a statement about those things. So, I make the concept a big part of my goal before my brush goes to work. Of course, it is more complicated than that, but identifying what I like about a scene and what to accentuate or subordinate does give me a direction to follow.