I look for a generous landscape. Since all landscapes are generous I look for one that is just beyond my ability to paint to some degree of satisfaction. Standing there, or moving around, you are experiencing something through the body, and I try to seal that experience in an object with sight leading the way. My degree of receptiveness is something I always try to increase. Paintings are always incomplete and are ended at the point where failure is the most charming. Summer is not eternal. Space is, therefore, not limitless. Vistas collapse, intimate places expand. Study the old, copy the eternal, make the new. Hunt for it, fish for it, let it come to you.

Some day, we might have great books of pictures to make our histories clear to each other, and the pictures will be landscapes: light-filled, clarifying relationships, verified by a kind of data we are not yet capable of producing. Those are the landscapes I look for and try to anticipate.

Paul Hotvedt

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