W. F. (Bill) Daniel

ARTIST STATEMENT

While I enjoy painting any subject, the landscape, with its range from subtle beauty to grandiose magnificence, always draws me back.  It never fails to challenge me to create an honest expression of its elemental power to excite and amaze. I am grateful for the opportunity that art has given me to express my love of the land and the light by which its beauty is revealed.  I craft my landscapes in a painterly style intended to evoke universal recollections of places both seen and imagined.  Viewers often tell me that they “recognize” a memory from their own lives in one of my paintings, even though the painting itself may be of a very different place.  Painting is never easy, but the satisfaction of “getting it down” in a way that speaks truthfully to another person is so deeply gratifying that I keep returning to it despite its frustrations and disappointments.

As it is my goal to create a vibrant sense of light in my landscapes, I paint en plein air frequently in order to keep fresh my sense of light.  I find that my work in the field and in the studio complement one another.  The difficulties of plein air painting – rapidly changing light, the challenges of weather and insects, the inconvenience of carrying a studio on my back – force me to paint loosely and rapidly, while staying true to the feeling of the moment.  In the studio, the challenge becomes one of maintaining that immediacy and freshness while developing a small color sketch into a larger work.  In the comfort of my studio and without the time pressure of changing light, I can experiment with other materials and techniques.  Those studio adventures, in turn, inform my field work.

I have painted in Europe and across North America – in places both instantly recognizable and magnificently obscure.  I have squeezed my easel into narrow passageways in Venice and painted beneath the broad expanse of the Colorado sky.  I have struggled to capture fleeting alpenglow on peaks in Wyoming’s Wind River Mountains and surging surf along the coasts of Maine and Oregon.  Everywhere I paint, though, the challenge is always the same: to channel the entirety of my experience – the ever-changing light, the heat of the sun, the music of the birds or the stream, the smell of the sage or the Ponderosa pine – all of it – into paint on canvas.  An impossible task!  But attempting it satisfies a need so deep in my heart that I have not found any other way to reach it.