Process
Each piece of Rogue Goat art begins with a carefully selected length of live edge wood. I work mostly with domestic hardwood species because I prefer the way the carving edges are cleaner in the denser wood, but it's primarily the grain, shape and colour tones that will draw me to working with a species.
The characteristics of the wood will suggest a landscape to me. The wood becomes both the world beneath the soil through which the roots trace, and the defining line of the world that will rise above it. The shape of the wood and the grain will communicate the composition, rivers and lakes in the painting will flow in unison with the grain. While I tend to live within a range of blues, from melancholic, dream grey blue to super saturated indigo, the way that light hugs land and sea and the soft pinks of sunrise also flow from my paintbrush.
Each piece always has roots, the world below, and tree silhouettes, the world above. I use acrylics with lots of water and straight from the tube to shift between transparency and opaqueness in the world I create on a birch painting panel. Signature elements of my style are a blurred, watery outline to my trees and speckling, paint splatters in dark blue, sienna and white that for me, mimic the disintegration of memory, as captured in an old home movie.
The wood is hand sanded, finished with tung oil and then affixed to the painting board, sometimes with copper etching or patinated copper incorporated.
What I want most for each Rogue Goat piece to become is a window on reverence, for it to capture the feeling of quietude that comes from standing small in a big, beautiful world, insignificant but exceptionally unique to an ancient, ongoing world.