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For artist Deborah Paris, the southern woods of her childhood and the Pineywoods of east Texas are where she feels most at home, where she feels the energy and hum of nature. Classically trained and feeling a “kindred spirit” to the likes of Hudson River School painters Thomas Cole, Asher Durand, and Albert Bierstadt, the artist paints the woods from memory. In recent years, the style of Paris has changed, painting not the form describing light, but the feeling and energy of the memory.
“The landscape, especially the southern woods of my childhood and the Pineywoods of east Texas, is where I can feel the energy and hum of nature. It’s where past, present, and future seem to collapse into a single moment. The layered glimpses of leaf and sky, foliage and trunk, litter and deadfall, reflections, and stream bottoms, all collide and break apart like a kaleidoscopic image.
“I worked outdoors for many years, both drawing and painting, then later using drawings as reference for studio works, and finally working from memory. Memory is personal, selective, and generative. It tells you what is most important to you. Every painting starts with memory.
“In the past few years, the visual vocabulary of my work has shifted dramatically, although the themes of time, metaphor and nature have remained paramount. This change came about as I worked to paint the act of looking—what deKooning called slipping glimpses—rather than a unified field or view. This required a change in almost every aspect of my work from how I approached the picture plane to how the paint was applied. Of necessity, I now place less emphasis on form and more on movement and light. This is not the form describing light which I employed before but rather the light which represents the energy and hum of nature moving around and through the woods. This also brought me closer to something that evokes the experience of looking—less “this is what I saw” and more “this is how it felt to see it.”
“I am a writer as well as a painter. In 2020 my book Painting the Woods: Nature, Memory and Metaphor was published (Texas A&M University Press). It is a memoir of my time in Lennox Woods, an old growth southern hardwood forest near my home. I spent two years walking, observing, and drawing. Over forty paintings resulted and what I learned about the forest and myself during that time still forms the bedrock of my practice–observation, memory, and the quest to find the open seam between the outward appearance of things and their deep meaning.”
For Once, Then, Something
BY ROBERT FROST
Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs
Always wrong to the light, so never seeing
Deeper down in the well than where the water
Gives me back in a shining surface picture
Me myself in the summer heaven godlike
Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.
Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb,
I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,
Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,
Something more of the depths—and then I lost it.
Water came to rebuke the too clear water.
One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple
Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,
Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?
Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.
