The reason I say landscape painter is that my motivation is to connect with the visual world that I live in and to stand there and look. I love being visually made aware of every little nuance, which I often miss even while walking or even while sitting down. So what I do is take a portable easel outside and usually go to one place for maybe a month at a time, different times of day, different weather conditions, sometimes different seasons, and watch. And by drawing and painting, I feel that I have a real intimate, almost physical relationship with the landscape, because each mark really represents a sand dune, or the beach itself, the sand, or the people in the water. Most of all, the hardest and most mysterious and most dear to my heart is the air. To touch the air and to try to make that a physical color is a never-ending challenge for me.
I guess I need the landscape as a dialogue. I’m better in a dialogue. So in a sense landscape painting might be different than other painters in their studio, in their heads I’m not so good at that.
Traveling to different places is also important, so that I can see a California dry landscape next to an ocean next to a salt marsh next to a Vermont mountainside.
What do I hope? I think I hope, well first of all, that I can become (I know it sounds weird) in a way a better person by watching nature unfold. I really hope to portray the world as a very beautiful place for this existence on this earth, for this particular life that each of us has here, now. If it does that for anyone else, or maybe more what I hope is that if anyone can look at these little landscapes that I do and look at the world in a more loving or precise, or a way that makes them filled with awe, I will have felt very honored to be able to do that.
So thank you very much for listening.
Marjorie Portnow. Painter. New York City, New York, U.S.A. B.A., Case Western Reserve; M.A., Brooklyn College. Solo exhibitions include Fischback Gallery and Odyssia Gallery, NYC, and Garcus-Krakow Gallery in Boston. Ms. Portnow has received awards from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, The Tiffany Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute, as well as two NEA Fellowships.
