The river bottoms have never ceased to cast a spell over me.  My contemporaries are drawn to the Big Muddy over and over, to record its silt-laden waters coursing between limestone bluffs and fertile bottom lands across our state.  I have always been more interested in that through which the river passes -- the SOIL.  Strange as it may seem, it is more captivating to me than scintillating waters.  As an artist, I feel that a part of my purpose is to distill beauty from the “unbeautiful” to find the sublime in the ordinary, to see order in chaos.

This May, our gardens were replete with, literally, thousands of roses, iris, peonies, dianthus and wisteria.  As I set up my painting sundries and prepared to paint the garden, I found my gaze drifting into the distance -- Looking past the prismatic blooms to the river flats. Serene and mystical --  this serpentine prairie, across which the river has whip-lashed over the centuries, is as subtle and profound a motif as the water itself.  I find myself transported by the atmospheric haze which gently modulates through myriad tints of blue and lavender, and occasionally flashes coral and lemon at sunset or dawn, and glows with a pearlescent light as the moon rises over the valley.  Then, there are the archetypal trees -- this universal motif holding echoes of the Epte and the Seine, Monet, Pissarro and Van Gogh.

As I mentally lash myself for ignoring the flowers to make a painting of “mud” I ask myself “what could be a more noble motif than soil?”   To me, the Missouri River Valley is a plain composed of billions of tiny silica mirrors that reflect and refract the colored light of the sky.  A luminous expanse of putty tones that changes as the crops it nourishes mature through shades of chartreuse, emerald, ochre and taupe.  In spring and summer, it glows with a lavender and purple light, striking at sundown with coral pink light on the west side of the furrows, and purple shadows on the east.  All winter long, the bottoms are an
understated palette of taupe, putty and linen, at times flashing prussian blue between patches of snow and ice, at times dissolving in cobalt haze as the snow melts on a still, 33 degree evening.

Brian Mahieu

29 May 2000 

Exhibits featuring my plein air landscapes:  A DAY IN THE COUNTRY  April of 2002

 THE MOOD OF COLOR  October of 2003.

 

Emerald Waterfall 36 X 36 inches, oil on canvas private collection	The River's Breath Lavender Fogbank Lifting 30 X 40 inches, oil on linen private collection
Lapis Hills - Autumn Dusk No. 4, Willow Grove Series, Mar 1998 30 X 48 inches, oil on canvas private collection	Moonlight - March Snow No. 7, Willow Grove Series, Mar 1998 30 X 48 inches, oil on canvas private collection
Purple Clouds Descend the Carnelian Sky 26 X 40 inches, oil on linen private collection	Vernal Equinox 36 X 48 inches, oil on linen private collection
Thanksgiving Eve No.5, Willow Grove Series, Nov. 1997 30 X 48 inches, oil on canvas private collection	The Willow Grove - October Dusk No. 2, Willow Grove Series, Oct. 1997 24 X 30 inches, oil on canvas private collection

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Twilight Drizzle -- Ghosts of Hardeman's Garden
    oil on linen 30 x 30 inches
private collection