Sometimes you paint something in much the same way you’d go for a walk. You just decide that it would be pleasing to be occupied with visiting an imaginary place, and in the case of art, one visits by painting. That’s how this picture came into being. I think I must have painted it in winter. I was definitely in the studio and not anywhere near Hawaii. The river, meanwhile, could be purple in nature by some rare convergence of weather and odd lighting, but chiefly this one is purple because I felt like making it that color. Also, it’s rather a gravity defying river in its gesture.
Sometimes you cannot explain why things have to be as they are, but the composition of this picture obeys a chromatic and compositional logic that are necessary to it. The things that make it what it is increase it’s tropicality, and I wanted it to be very tropical. Perhaps it became more tropical than nature herself ever is.
[Top of the post: Tropical Ridge, by Aletha Kuschan, acrylic on canvas]
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