Keeping my work fresh, I have found, is a challenge. I often worry that it will be hard to continue to be a landscape painter in a place where you have lived and worked all your life. But I have found that what used to seem to be a limited resource is, in fact, quite limitless. The more I paint, the more options for paintings are opened up. While I am constantly looking for new motifs to paint, I have also noticed that working from the same places over and over again has infinite possibilities--in that the light changes throughout the day, as well as throughout the year, and offers endless subtle changes in mood and personality.

I find myself reexamining many things that I have worked already or passed by in times past and finding that there is something there that I didn’t see or maybe was not capable of expressing before. I find it very interesting to try to understand what it is about a place that causes me to stop and paint. For the most part, I stop because I like what I am looking at, or there is a certain color that jumps out at me. I also believe that there is a certain geometry and or rhythm that may be some of the underlying influences.

As I strive to move forward in my work I am trying to understand and express these things. I am constantly looking for the balance between the abstract quality of a satisfying paint stroke verses the accumulation of paint strokes that add up the visual expression and hopefully then to some kind of an emotional experience for who ever stops to look.

Doug Braithwaite received his Bachelors of Fine Art from the University of Utah in 1991. His work currently shows in galleries throughout the United States from New York to California.

Braithwaite has taught landscape painting and figure through the University of Utah and privately since 1991.