When Brad Teare was working as an illustrator, he went to see an exhibition of paintings by Vincent van Gogh at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. He had seen many of the impressionist’s paintings in reproduction and marveled at the visceral power of the thickly applied paint. He experimented with applying thick paint in abstract works but later returned to painting landscapes with his new mastery of the medium.
Forest Majesty, oil on canvas, 48 x 48"
“There’s a reality to impasto,” he says. “It becomes sculptural. You want to touch it. My late wife was a trompe l’oeil painter. That also triggers the instinct to touch. I think as children we learned to know the world by seeing and wanting to touch what we see. Even though we’re discouraged from touching paintings, seeing a painting with thick impasto triggers a mental process of traveling over the surface of the painting and imagining touching it.”
Summer Majesty, oil on canvas, 60 x 48"
His painting Memories Past came about when he saw the scene near the Utah/Colorado border. He stopped to sketch it and the interesting history it contains. Often, he will do a color sketch en plein air or a graphite sketch with color notes. Although he does use digital photographs, he finds that subtle details like the colors in shadows are often lost.
In this painting, the colors in the shadows are rich and varied and applied in a way that differs from van Gogh’s technique. “His technique is obvious,” Teare explains, “putting down an orange, for instance, and then a complementary blue right next to it. I like to lay down the color and its complementary in one stroke. The shadows of the barn in the foreground of Memories Past are a mix of greens, purples and blues. There’s something magical about seeing the colors blending together.”
Red Rock Majesty, oil on canvas, 48 x 48"
In the painting there is what he calls a “hierarchy of texture” with the thickest impasto in the foreground, becoming thinner as the distance increases. The warm colors of the foreground become cooler in the distance, adding to the sensation of depth.
The same technique can be observed in the tightly cropped 4-foot-square scene Forest Majesty, with the living lichens contrasting with the dying leaves.
Memories Past, oil on canvas, 30 x 30"
Thirty of Teare’s latest paintings can be seen in the exhibition Brad Teare—Western Journeys, opening May 19 at Anthony’s Fine Art in Salt Lake City and continuing through July 31. —
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