This sweet little painting, “Verbania Trail” is of the woods near my aunt and uncles’s home. They live in Verbania, Italy, a semi-rural town on Lago Maggiore, north of Milan and near the Switzerland border.
This trail goes up into the woods and hidden in those same words is a tiny chapel, a little secret surprise that you come across on this walk.
Verbania Trail. 30″ x 20″, Acrylic on Canvas, © 2005 Cedar Lee
Seeking to capture the interplay of sky and foliage, the negative space of light popping through bunches of leaves, is an endlessly interesting challenge for me as a painter. In my paintings of the forest that year, I approached this challenge by blurring many dabs of paint together, the effect like a looser, sloppier version of pointillism showing up in the treetops.
My trees then were a monochromatic green-on-green-on-green. These days, I put all kinds of wild colors into my forests.