Challenge of the foreground

My Sleeping Bear Dunes landscapes, such as Footsteps in the Sand and Empire Bluff, reflect how early visual environments shape perception. Growing up in Wilhelmshaven on the North Sea, I was daily exposed to wide horizontal vistas and minimal foreground detail. This conditioned my visual system to prioritize depth and distance over close complexity. Later, studying Cézanne’s shadowed foregrounds and Emily Carr’s foliage helped me develop methods to abstract dense plant forms and integrate them into compositions that maintain spatial clarity.

Empire bluff (2010): How can I depict the intricate foreground at the top of the Empire bluff overlooking  Lake Michigan with its multitude of greenery – wildflowers, grasses, grape leaves – still in early morning shadow? Looking at Cézanne’s shadowed foregrounds painted in the early morning inspired me to abstract the complexity of the foliage covering the sandy dune.

Divide( 2018): An Empire bluff view from below the top. The distant Lake Michigan and South Bar Lake, divided by the Empire village beach, are viewed across a foreground of trees illuminated by the early morning sun. Again, initially I struggled to paint the complexity of the sun-lit leaves in the foreground, . This time, I found inspiration in the work of Emily Carr, the great Canadian painter of the first half of the 20th century.

Footsteps in the Sand(2018): This painting was done rapidly, within one month of arriving in Michigan from New York City, because of the early June deadline of the Grand Rapids Artprize.com. There was no time to spare asking for advice from the living or the dead –  I soldiered on alone to paint ‘Footsteps in the Sand’, and it was fun!

Why was painting the foreground of ‘Footsteps’ easier for me? Maybe it has to do with my childhood visual experience. Nearly every day, I would leave the gray concrete of my apartment building to walk my dog on a dyke that protects my German hometown Wilhelmshaven (which lies below sea level at high tide) from the North Sea. One could walk along a gravel path on top of the dyke or below its grassy slope on a brick path framed by granite boulders descending to the ocean water. At low tide,  mudflat were exposed, stretching all the way from Denmark to the Netherlands.

While in the granite boulders in the foreground were visually stimulating, most of my gaze extended into the distance, across the large bay of the North Sea, the Jadebusen. Thus, I grew up looking at  vast expanses rather than lovely flowers right in front of me.

What comes to mind is an old experiment with kittens: those raised in an environment of vertical bars became oblivious to horizontal bars and would ran up into them rather than leap across. In contrast, daily walks  with my dog along the North Sea attuned me to horizontal lines rather than vertical lines present in mountains and cityscapes.

The sparse, sandy foreground of Footsteps in the Sand was well within my visual comprehension.