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Robert Lewis Hoover - Painting with 4 hay bales |
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Robert Lewis Hoover - Painting with 4 hay bales |
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Robert Lewis Hoover painting on location |
I started oil painting in 1994. Landscapes became a natural outlet for my soul, seeking solitude. Nature is my higher power.
Telephone poles become crosses, clouds become cathedrals, and roads and highways are my spiritual path. Road signs remain empty because there are no directions in life. I worship outdoors.
These paintings are not reality, rather my interpretation of what I wish were true. Peace, tranquility, hope, and faith permeate my paint. My paintings are my meditation, not as an art making process, but as an end result.
Buddhists use the image of the sun behind the clouds to describe inner perfection, I use this image to describe Heaven on Earth.
I am a self-taught painter. My teachers have been the great masters that came before me. I wear my influences on my sleeve. I call my paintings Sacred Landscapes which describes my belief that not only is God in nature, but that God is nature. I can not describe in words my deep connection with the earth; so I paint. The majority of my paintings are painted outdoors, in the fields outside of Goshen N.Y. I treat my subject matter of hay bales much like the religious icons that I paint, with reverence. The hay bale emerges from the earth in spring, it is used for cover by small animals in summer and is baled and fed to animals in the winter.....then back to earth from where it came.....a cycle, a circle, the same as it’s shape. The hay bale is a modern day relic....soon to be extinct. In it’s place will be developments scarring the landscape forever. I paint the hay bales and surrounding crops and fields with a fervor, while I still can.
I paint in many different styles. I have no pre-planned strategy. The scene dictates the mood; different emotions elicit various styles. I consider myself a modern traditionalist. I borrow from the past, yet tread new ground. My hope is to capture the ordinary and reveal its beauty...to flush God out into the open, the visible. In the summer of 2003 I painted 65 paintings in 65 days. When Van Gogh was in Arles, he painted 70 paintings in 70 days. In the summer of 2004 I surpassed both of these figures completing 80 paintings in 65 days. I intend to keep going “nose to the grindstone” as Vincent would say. I have heard it said that the word inspiration derives from “in spirit.” If that is true, I guess I’m one Holy Roller.