This week’s featured artist is Michael Orwick, a fellow Oregon native and painter, whose landscapes are soft reminders of nature’s far-reaching beauty.
On his website, Michael suggests that each painting tells a story, or creates a setting for the viewer to fall into and create a story of his or her own.
The soft edges and wispy atmosphere in the painting above, entitled Golden Tapestry, certainly help to do just that. With a winding river and far-off slumbering hills, it’s a place that belongs.
I also love Orwick’s use of golden light throughout his paintings. In Western Oregon, with our clouds and rain, it’s often one or two rays of sunlight glancing through overcast skies that really enhance the beauty of a landscape and add a dash of drama.
In A Beautiful Muddy Morass, below, Orwick shows a scene that might even be unremarkable without those glorious sunlit trees.
Oregon is known for its lakes and rivers, which are often framed in picturesque wooded forests and hills—and although I don’t know for sure that all of these paintings are from Oregon, they do look as though they could be.
You’ll notice how Michael makes great use of those rivers, adapting water’s natural winding pathways to draw the viewer’s eyes deeper into his landscapes.
Even so, his paintings don’t look contrived, which can easily happen when artists use this compositional technique without basing their painting on a real landscape.
And while many people might not enjoy Western Oregon’s cloudy skies, there is one benefit: spectacular sunsets, as shown in these last two paintings.
If you’d like to see more of Michael Orwicks landscape paintings (as well as his more whimsical illustrations) take a moment and visit www.michaelorwick.com.