"A River Runs Through It"

Acrylic   18"x18"   (6"x6" stretched canvases)

This multi-panel painting came about through an interesting chain of ideas. After painting a series of small black and white value studies of various subjects just for practice, I decided to tape them up in a group on the wall of my studio. I wanted to enjoy the fruits of my labor and think about how I might use them in future paintings. I really enjoyed how they looked arranged close together, with the values leading your eye from one to the next and throughout the grouping. I thought it would be fun to purposefully design a piece of artwork made up of a series of small paintings, each depicting a different aspect of one subject. I liked the idea of nine parts making up the whole...multiples of three, which is a number that just seems to work when it comes to design. The subject that I chose is the landscape around Valley City, ND. Central to the artwork is the Sheyenne River that runs through that beautiful valley and three means of crossing those waters. I tried to make parts of each little painting pull you into the one next to it (maybe a similar color, shape, or value), and I especially wanted you to feel how the river, in all its forms, runs through it all.