My paintings explore nature through form, space, and color. They possess an organic structure, devoid of the human figure or representation, expressing their own life force as a breath of life and sense of possibility, colors radiating and contrasting with one another. Like a musical arrangement, each variation counterpoised against another, yet all existing within one cohesive whole. They are painted with a highly articulated use of color, eliminating recognizable imagery. Textures and color work in tandem with transparent and opaque layers of paint to create a surface for the viewer to interpret.

The process for me is like breathing paint onto the canvas. My pictures are large, colorful and unframed, yet complex, intimate and intense. The art is void of superfluous rhetoric, but reference nature: mountains and valleys, rocks and boulders, forests and deserts, oceans and the heavens.

I am most comfortable with larger canvases because of their impact, and by utilizing complex forms and color combinations, they transform the viewer more readily to another plane. Painting large pictures allows me the experience of being very intimate and human with the canvas, while allowing the viewer to open up and become part of the painting. And by viewing these paintings at close range as well as from far away, it is my goal that the viewer has the opportunity to experience a sense of intimacy as well as awe, a transcendence of moving beyond themselves to sense the unknown.


Henry Callahan