Larry
Bryson

The Painting Process

Larry Bryson paints in oil, and every painting starts from something real and observed. An elephant seal pup on the beach, an egret at the pond, a tule elk mother, a stand of glowing alders, the soft fields of Nicasio, wildflowers and native plants: his subjects come from the California he has known since a childhood among the redwoods of Mill Valley. His eye was trained twice. As an art student at Whitworth and in the post-graduate painting program at San Francisco State, he learned to paint; as a biology student, he learned to look at how living things are built. In college botany he drew plant structures and life cycles, and that habit of close study still guides him. Before color comes structure: the proportions of an animal, the way a stem carries a flower, the shape of a hillside. Fourteen years of color photography of wildflowers, from 1975 to 1989, sharpened that attention to light and color, and it carries into the oil paint today. Larry describes his paintings as moving between levels of abstraction. Some passages loosen into the broken, lively strokes of impressionism; others stay precise. Whatever the balance, the proportions, structures and colors tend to emphasize what is real and observed. What he is after is the overlooked moment. He sets out to point out the things around us that might be missed and to emphasize what makes them feel special, so a viewer meets a familiar place or creature as if for the first time. Words, he says, interfere. Like Milton Avery, he believes that if he could write it, he would not need to paint, so the studio's real explanation is always the finished canvas.