 If you enjoy watching Common Ground online please consider making a tax-deductible donation at lptv.org. Lakeland Public Television presents Common Ground brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota. At that time we kind of felt that the more stuff is in it the better the painting is, but it really isn't that that's kind of kindred to saying the more notes in a song, the better the song, or the more words in the book, the better the book, but that isn't true at all. It's not how many little things, it's the melody, it's the theme, it's like the drumbeat and the rhythm of a painting and I'm very much in tune with that. I'm Mary Pettis, I'm an artist, and I'm at the Jaquise Arts Center in Aiken, Minnesota. This is my artist reception for a solo exhibition that I have here. I live in Minnesota and I'm from Taylor's Falls living along the beautiful St. Croix River Valley and I was drawn to the river valley several decades ago because of the beauty of it. It reminded me of the Hudson River School and I've done many many paintings of the river valley and I continue to do that expanding now throughout Minnesota and also around the country. The greatest gift I think of being an artist, particularly painting out of doors or having my roots be an out of door painting and then trying to bring that into the studio, is that I go into a zone that kind of transcends my thinking. It feels to me like I'm making a connection with the spiritual aspect of my nature so when I paint out of doors I'm connecting with not just the stuff I'm looking at but I truly do feel the roots of the trees and the essence of the sense that I'm standing on the same ground that is nurturing those trees and the moisture in the air is the water that I'm looking at when I'm painting and I feel it on my skin and I become part of it and we become one and it's that profound connection that goes beyond thinking that captivates me and continues to captivate me and I try to bring that into my work that going beyond the surface is I think probably the single most thing that connection to what lies beyond the surface is probably the most compelling aspect of what I do. So okay let's take a look at a couple of my favorites here. This painting is called Time Stand Still which is what I named the exhibition after and the painting is of a little corner of a pond that I've painted numerous times but I love this painting particularly because of the way that we travel through the painting. It symbolizes a lot of what I've come to try to capture in my work at this stage of my development and that is using oil paint as a medium, as a way to get us to become more introspective and this painting and to truly appreciate the beauty that surrounds us. As you look deeper in the painting it takes us to deeper levels of relaxation so it's kind of a mandala of sorts and that's why I like this. This painting is called Waiting for the Light and it's inspired from a pond that I painted dozens and dozens of times. I've watched many sunrises over that little pond and there are different things that I love about this painting. I wanted it to be classic in nature. One of the reasons why I bought the place is because of this very classic old soft maple cluster and the oak trees and it is reminiscent of the Hudson River School and George Innis' work which affected me greatly when I was a young artist and so I thought now that I was a better artist I would like to try to put that kind of a feeling in this classic very balanced fulcrum type composition and it's very dark but as the light begins to spread up beyond the clouds there's some backlighting. There's a lot of things that are happening in here but the painting itself is very somber, very relaxing, very slow moving because of the tight values and because of the interplay and then the composition is a very clean, simple composition without a lot of disruption. So there's a little backlighting on here we're always drawn toward the light which is off of the picture evidence of the light here around this edge but yet it's a very gentle edge and so our eye moves very gently in and out of the painting and then here too, we come in here, there's a little fog that's lifting which is the evidence of the movement, the clouds are moving but everything is moving very slowly and it's very much like a symphony it is enveloping and unfolding really slowly which is very relaxing I also like about this painting that it has a wide variety of surface texture one of my great teachers, Joe Wang, said why oil paint? He couldn't speak English very well but one of the first things he said in the workshop is why oil paint and I came to think about that a lot and I think that what it is that attracts me to the medium of oil paint is that you can get a heavy impasto and you can get glazes and you can have thick paint and thin paint and show the brushwork and show a lot of emotion in a variety of ways and the more that I paint the more I come to understand that it's going to take many more decades before I really understand the potentials of this medium When I am invited to the Maui Planner Invitational and I always tell them I'm from Minnesota and they always feel so sorry for me and I always tell them, no, don't feel sorry for me, I love it we embrace winter and do you paint in the winter? Oh yeah, I do that, of course and this is an example of a painting that I started on location and this is Minnehaha Falls in winter and it's interesting I have a painting in the exhibition that's Minnehaha Falls in early summer as well which is a completely different feeling but it's the same waterfall this is a prominent waterfall in the Twin Cities area and I loved the light, I tried to get there early in the morning when the sunlight would be bathing the entire basin and it would be in snow but I got there a little bit too late and at first I was disappointed because I thought that, oh shucks, I missed it I missed the light and I'll have to come back but then I thought, well I'll just begin the painting and as often happens when we begin painting on location the painting tells us how it wants to be painted and the painting has a way of showing us the beauty where we might not have been looking for it which is one of the things that I try to incorporate in all of my work is letting nature speak to us instead of trying to impose our will on it this is a great example of that because I thought that it would be too dark because all there was were these couple of streaks of light because the sun was too far over to the left and then as I thought about it I thought, oh wow that's a beautiful design the sun raking across these icicles and then coming down toward us along the right side so we move and it's a very dramatic but different painting than I had set out to paint which is one of the joys of painting on location well the Jaquis Art Center is an extraordinary building and they've done an amazing job carrying on the spirit of the era and I'm sure Francis Lee Jaquis as well who is from this area originally I think one of the main functions of art is and probably the art that I do too that's based in and of the natural world is I guess the comments here the most is I go by that all the time, I see that all the time but I didn't realize it was so beautiful and an artist's job I think is to render visible what we all see but to show it in a new light and help us to look more closely and deeply at at the beauty that surrounds us If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland Public Television's Common Ground, consider making a contribution at lptv.org