Rick Landesberg

As a student attending Central Saint Martins College of Art (then Saint Martins School of Art) in London in the early 1970s, I traveled to Scotland every chance I could. Witnessing that northern landscape was a powerful, formative experience that has continued to inform my work and aesthetic. The issue for me isn’t simply what that mysterious environment looked like — the ever-changing skies, the mercurial weather, the dramatic shifts of sun and shadow. It was the character and spirit of places of this sort. The list of these places has grown to include the southwest of England, Down East Maine, the Tarn region of France, eastern rural Ohio, and here in western Pennsylvania. In the act of painting my focus is on what these places do, what they mean, what they suggest rather than trying to depict what they look like.

So many artists across time have re-invented places so well and so inventively with pitch-perfect tensions between a representative landscape and the physicality of the painting itself. Piero Della Francesca, Joan Mitchell, Jacob van Ruisdael, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (especially in Italy), Camille Pissarro, Fairfield Porter. I have to add to the list three painters whose work also embodies that strange Philadelphia aesthetic, my former teachers Larry Day and Sidney Goodman, and dear friend Neysa Grassi.

Many paintings begin with witnessing a particular place, but this serves only as a departure point. The loyalty is always to the painting and the experience of its making.