Dennis Bertram » Profile

Location

Region

United States of America

City

Buffalo NY

Profile

Website

http://www.bertramart.com

Personal Statement

My paintings are about the difficulties and complexities of living that can sometimes undermine good decisions and what one attempts to accomplish. I did not purposefully set out to do paintings about these ideas. I decided to try my hand at landscape painting en plein air but I soon was very dissatisfied with what I was painting. So I decided to take a step back and re-think what I was doing and find a way to simplify my paintings rather than get caught up in all the complexities of painting from nature.

I have many photographs of homes, churches and buildings, photographs of places where I have lived or visited. Images that intrigued me. I took some of these photographs and made highly simplified paintings from them. I also went to my sketch book and did a lot of simple pencil line drawings investigating and documenting the large variety of design and architecture evident in all the photographs. It then dawned on me that I could use this imagery to build, construct, create my own landscape paintings. This was a liberating decision for now I was no longer caught up in all the details and decisions and what one has to attend to when painting from nature. Instead of my thoughts being preoccupied with things outside of me I started to think about things inside. Afterall, I was now having a conversation just between myself and the canvas or other support. There was no third party present.

I began to think about my own experiences, where I have been, the things I have done, the ups and downs and the decisions that went along. With the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, looking back on some of those decisions they must have been really off base for even though they seemed reasonable at the time I made them and I made them with the best of intentions I did not accomplish what I set out to accomplish. Such is not unique to me, but for me the explanation is that things, life can get very complicated especially when one sets out to accomplish something that takes a lot of time and effort and involves other people. There are things one wishes one knew, a lot of what one knows is either irrelevant or wrong, there is much one is not in control of, the human intellect has its limits and often seems to succumb easily to information overload, and although one may have plans and agendas so do most people with whom one interacts and rarely do the two mesh and sometimes are in conflict. That is what I mean when I refer to how the complexities of life can undermine good decisions and derail what one sets out to accomplish. And those ideas in one way or another underlie my landscape paintings. In a way, I went almost full circle. From seeking to avoid the complexities of nature, through simplification I emerged in a different complexity in my paintings, but at least one of my own doing, my own creation; about one person’s experiences and reflections on them.

History

Member for

2 years 13 weeks