NATURAL SELECTIONS

The Pulitzer Prize winning Kiowa novelist M. Scott Momaday wrote, “I am interested in the way that we look at a given landscape and take possession of it in our blood and brain. None of us lives apart from the land entirely; such an isolation is unimaginable.”

- JOHN O'HERN

Whether we experience a landscape in a pocket park in the city, our back yards or the vastness of the prairies, the mountains or the seashore, we absorb the sights, sounds and smell and become one with them. Sights, sounds and smells can bring the experience of the distant experience back to us.

Thomas McNickle writes, “When I confront the landscape, I am overwhelmed by the specificity of the moment, the place and the light. Through painting I try, not only to experience the moment, but to connect with it in a way that is outside the moment…timeless.

“I want my work to be evocative of the initial experience not descriptive of it. Ultimately, it must be of the experience not about it. I want the scene to take precedence over what I do and what I think I know.”

His painting, Blue Moon on the Scout Pond evokes the extraordinary experience of the world turned blue. Since I always want to know why, after experiencing the phenomenon from my tent while on retreat at the Prajna Mountain Forest Refuge north of Santa Fe, New Mexico, I did a little research. Our vision occurs through the rods and cones in the retina of the eye. In low light, vision comes from the rods that are sensitive to blue.