My paintings are rarely a painted "location snapshot” of one specific place and are generally a compilation of several sources of reference from my photos or sketches from imagination. Painting location can be beautiful but it is just not the way I have come to create after now 40 years of creating artwork.
I work in a themed series often times in the thought gathering process for years and are compiled from ideas and photos taken long ago or modeled for the collection. In the case of the Amish series many trips to Lancaster county PA have formed the basis for the work. This is a favorite and something I will always come back to for new work.
The Stargazer series was long in the making first wanting to do the American Indian and the Southwest landscape. The skies are created by using several of my photo’s from my White Mountains photo trips and studies of formations from the Hubble telescope. They were combined after dozens of pen and ink studies then brought to life on canvas.
The work was discovered by a Cherokee Indian from Texas and he has written about each painting which will be published someday. It is more common for an artist to illustrate the written word rather that the written word describe a painting. They are beautiful written interpretations I could never imagine and have brought a deeper meaning to the work.
My inspiration to become an artist came at an early age from my Grandfather who came here from France in 1900. He was a self taught painter working mainly in Pastel's and was a master woodworker. The simple pleasure of drawing at the kitchen table was a tradition each time he came to visit.
My Father gave me a box of pencils that belonged to my Grandfather when I was young and to this day all of my paintings have a small part of the drawing from one of his pencils, I like that there is a part of his past in every painting I do.
The "Skyscapes" series in the making has dramatic sky and cloud formations mostly from the Midwest and with a low horizon of distant farms, wild plains, old west and Amish homesteads. It is a study of vast cloud formations and the simple beauty of life on the old American plains.
SKYSCAPE
Copyright Info
All images Copyright John Paul Marmonti. Can not be copied my mechanical means, scanned or Posted on any website, magazine, or newspaper without express written permission from the Artist Copyright John Paul Marmonti.
