Flower
Bed
oil on canvas
12" x 12"
Carmel
Coast
oil on canvas
16" x 20"
Cascade
Marsh
pastel
30" x 22"
Cascade
Road
oil on board
10" x 10"
Coastal
Mountains
(triptych)
oil on board
each panel 16" x 7"
Fishing
and Sailing
pastel
26" x 19"
River
oil on board
10" x 12"
Pond
oil on canvas
11" x 13"
Russian
River
pastel
22" x 30"
Coastal
Mountains
oil on canvas
18" x 24"
Table
Rock
pastel
19" x 26"
Pear
Trees near Medford
pastel
26" x
19"
Cerillos,
NM -Springtime
pastel
22" x 30"
Sawtooth
Range nr. Stanley, Idaho
pastel
30" x 22"
Daffodils,
VT
oil
24" x 30"
"I paint and draw from what is in front of me. It's rare that I work on a landscape away from the actual site, or from the figure away from the model. My subjects are the hills, pastures, villages and towns of Vermont, the coasts of Maine and California, the Rocky Mountains from Idaho to Colorado, the high deserts of the Southwest, and the hills of West Virginia and Texas. I often feel quite fortunate to be a painter, and that my landscape painting is simply an excuse to be outside in spectacular countryside. I want people who see these pictures to understand a little of what I felt when I was standing out next to a frozen pond or looking across a town field. This idea seems so connected with my being in the middle of my subject, that it feels peculiar to work anywhere else. It certainly would be easier to work in my studio, but I've never figured out how.
I usually work slowly, building from a general composition lightly defined by line, adding the darkest darks and the brightest highlights, painting these darker and brighter than anything possible. The softening and subtleties come later; sometimes the original colors stay, sometimes not. The selections of detail, texture, movement, shape and form are often glued together with the light that I observe. I think of light as a very tangible presence in my view of places; the objects that inhabit the composition receive and hold this light in values relative to each other. There's certainly nothing new about this concept, painters from Piero to Monet have made this basic to their pictures. What I might be adding, if anything at all, I can't explain, but what I hope is that each picture has something of me in it, perhaps a fragment of a self portrait collected from being in these places I like to be.
I've been working for twenty five years at all of this. I think I am lucky indeed. I adore what I do. The trick to find another fifty years of this passion is to keep looking at this world, at the paper, at the colors as if I've never seen any of it before. In this way maybe some small ideas will get turned over and exposed, built upon and churned up again."
A graduate of the Slade School of Fine Art at University College London and The Rhode Island School of Design, Henry Isaacs' paintings are in numerous private, corporate and public collections and museums. He is widely represented in galleries in the U.S. and England. Henry now resides in Norwich, Vt.