John O'Hern is an arts writer, curator and retired museum director who is providing a weekly contemplation of a single work of art from our gallery. In our fast-paced lives overflowing with information, we find it necessary and satisfying to slow down and take time to look. We hope you enjoy this perspective from John.

New among the works of Jeremy Mann are small 5" x 4” oil on papered panel paintings of a forest. They are a striking departure from the brooding San Francisco cityscapes I had first seen over 20 years ago. Both of our lives have changed since then. I now live in a converted adobe goat shed in the high desert of New Mexico and Jeremy now lives with his wife, the artist Nadezda, in an 18th century farmhouse “in the middle of a national park of forested mountains” in Spain.

I had admired his dark, brooding, paintings of the city about which he told me, “I think the grey and the sad is beautiful, and nothing moves my heart more than to be able to paint it.” I wasn’t prepared for his forest paintings, especially A Place I Stopped on the Way to Town #1 with its dark depths, glowing green lichen and the color he found in everything.

On his Instagram page, he wrote, “I always wanted to paint the inside of a forest, and I thought it was going to be difficult, so I didn’t. Now, living in a forest, I’m addicted. And I was right.”

As a lover of trees and forests, sitting or walking quietly and absorbing the richness of color and texture above ground and contemplating the unfathomable complexity of the flora communicating below its surface, I wanted to know how, after the chaos of the city, Jeremy was responding to his new environment. As expected, he didn’t let me down.

Today he walks through the forest on the way to the bakery in town 4 km away. This little painting is one of a series he is working on. “I was always looking at the world as things I would have to render,” he says, “and that would make any dense forest daunting to anyone. To progress myself, I learned long ago to do more than one of the same thing, and often the second one is more free, more inventive, more me.

Financial problems precluded his finishing his studio, “pleasantly forcing me to indulge in my dream of painting plein air as often as possible, my little paint box and the endless natural beauty around me became my new studio where this practice of multiple paintings in one sitting grew to show me what I knew, but didn’t understand; the natural world is just a reference to guide us, not to be duplicated. To be inspired by, not to try and replicate, a reference. A thing to ‘refer’ to, not to mimic. Forcing me to decide what I want to do on the panel in front of me out there in the still and beautiful forest, forcing me to focus on the language of brushwork and color. Forcing me, to accept and see change as new challenges to garner experience from. I changed my palette completely to only the simple but saturated tertiaries because I wanted to understand color and light at a different level, knowing this can only be gleaned from life and making those two elements the most important thing for me to stay focused on while sitting there in the forest or at the edge of the moving Mediterranean seaside.”

He recalls an incident in California where he learned to be still. “When I was painting in the west with many artists, we all set up our easels and dove into chasing that final product, the finished painting. It wasn’t but almost 30 minutes into my endeavor that I turned and saw an older, wiser man still staring out across the seemingly still landscape with not a single mark upon his canvas. Absorb, lest we simply wring a dry rag hoping for a sale. Much of the art life I began my career in was based upon that daily wringing. There is much, so so much more to creating than knowing your brushes, surfaces, mediums, forms, color harmonies and compositions, all the foundations we are taught and seek throughout our careers are missing some very important tools to master, so seemingly useless to the artist seeking a profit from a product, but indispensable when seeking a life of happiness creating unbounded and in peace. Knowing what to choose to paint, why we choose it, what we truly wish to say and how to say it, and how to put things in our hands to bring that vision to life has nothing much to do with material matters.

“This is where I began to see the richness of life, when I learned to sit still, in body and mind, that it was OK to sit still, that thinking and seeing are just as important tools as brush and surface, and come to know the nature I was roaming. That appreciation gave me some deeper knowledge which was missing in my practice. Sit, and look. Look long enough, sit still long enough, clear the mind of the rabble which has nothing to do with the moment of painting, and life provides us with a fantasy of forms, colors, harmonies, compositions, creatures, sounds and feelings we don’t get to experience running through the rat race of modernity’s distracting traps.”

Escaping the vagaries of the art world and life in the city has been difficult but, he is beginning to enjoy the freedom of sitting in the forest with his thermos of tea, looking and seeing. “Letting color and composition find a balance based on my desire to emote the feeling of being with me in that shady spot, and not worrying about having to make anything at all, to just be, to be in a state of creativity, spending time aware, absorbing and playing with colors and marks like any good forest child would do without responsibilities. I was beginning to truly see the reality of painting, that it’s about making an image in whatever way we like and not duplicating a rendering of an already existing reference. All of this is making great headway in the concurrent studio pieces in the works.”

Recently, Jeremy posted one of his forest paintings with a cryptic description of his day. “Took a hike up in the mountain, painted some trees, chased some sheep.”