HENRY ISAACS
After four decades in this business, my favorite pieces are the ones, when finished I can find some sort of a reflection of myself , the people, and places where I've been.
I do not know how to invent without a reference, real, and digested into the personal. I need to first smell, to feel, to look up and down, right and left, to understand the giant canopy that stretches over and around.
That long wide look, whether a view across a deep valley, or the model posing before me, informs and remains in my imagination. These first views are like gulps of air, some to be exhaled, and a bit to be stored for future consideration.
At the end of a day's work outside, I travel back down a mountain trail, head back along the stream bank, or ski across a meadow. The crates get bundled up and I ship them home to my studio on Little Cranberry Island. Days later the boxes are opened and I hang a dozen roughly started canvasses around the studio.
I begin on these again. Equipped with the experience of place, these rough strokes, souvenirs of where I was all around me, I am able to invent, selecting and editing the essential. I try to convey a sense of place to the viewer. I might reverse shadows and light, a blue sky to ochre. It is here in the studio that I find a two dimensional reality. Here is where I can hope to merge passion and observation into an image that is felt.
Without the thrill of visual discovery, and the long quiet observation, I cannot possibly conjure up a painting. However it is my memory of the visit, and my need to communicate my solitary ventures to some of the world's most beautiful places, that keeps me going. This is the fuel that brings me such joy, and constantly reminds me of the blessings of the extraordinary vocation within which I have wrapped my life.