Garrett Middaugh

Forest Bathing , landscape oil painting, in the Realism style, Texas artist

2019

Garrett Middaugh is a regional landscape painter working in oils and pastels whose subject matter varies from the mountains and desert of west Texas to the wetlands along the Texas coast, with a strong focus on Texas forests and trees. His palette is muted, stark, embracing the neutral colors of everyday experience. Avoiding the romantic, his landscapes are often painted at high noon or in the dead of winter. He paints in a fluid hyper realist style and feels most influenced by other landscape artists such as Neil Welliver and Rackstraw Downes. He sees landscape painting as a form of meditation, projecting outward, while solving equations and mapping the scene, realizing accuracy of objects and relationships, of light, color, textures, distances. "Landscape painting is for me a means of projecting outward, of meditating, examining the here and now of place. The process often feels similar to the satisfaction of solving math equations, intuitively realizing accuracy of objects and relationships, of light, color, textures, distances. For the most part I paint Texas. For several years I devoted a significant amount of time to painting its forests -- the complexity of forest alleviated my sense of horror vacui, the nearness and density of growth was comforting. I have also ventured into west Texas and Big Bend, and occasionally have attempted to capture the mesmerizing serenity of central Texas farm and ranchland." Garrett Middaugh