The Project

Painting the changing seasons reminds me that life is short.
Each phase of life is interesting, perhaps as good or
better than the last season.   Learn from the past,
look to the future, enjoy the present.

--Kevin Macpherson

In August 1996, shortly after finishing his book Fill Your Oil Paintings with Light & Color, Kevin Macpherson conceived of a series of paintings.  The term series is perhaps too trivial a description for what came to be called the Pond Project. 

This was not simply a group of works on a theme, nor a one-year exploration of a subject. Rather, the Pond Project was conceived as a physical challenge and a psychological adventure in which a view out to a nearby pond would be frozen on canvas, to be compared to others done at different times of the day and evening and in all the seasons.

Initially the project had no definite end, even if it did have a method.  Macpherson’s plan was to do one painting for each day of a year - 366 in total.  Because of his teaching and exhibition obligations, which required travel, he knew the project would extend over several years.  But he was ready to make the commitment and began marking a calendar with the days he would be gone and the days when he would be home to view Aspen Lake, a man-made pond approximately an acre in size.

The pond is only 100 yards from Macpherson’s home.  The bay window of the dining room and front deck look directly at this microcosm of nature nestled in the remote 8500-foot Valle Escondido, east of Taos, New Mexico.  Encircled by mountains, the ever-changing surface of the pond is surrounded by aspens and red willows, pines and spruce.  Stocked with trout, the pond has a maximum depth of 10 feet, with a slough-like environment that is home to numerous species of land and water birds, coyotes, elk, deer, bear, muskrats, beaver, neighboring dogs, cats and a handful of human residents who are part of the Valle Escondido Homeowners Association.  

Although he knew change was at the heart of the project, Macpherson held several elements constant.  Each painting was done on a 6-by-8-inch panel.  His palette - alizarin crimson, ultramarine blue, cadmium yellow light and white - remained consistent, and he stayed true to the same position looking out the window or on the front deck. He was also faithful to the reality of the scene’s composition, recording the physical elements in their actual relationship to one another.

Other factors varied, however.  Each painting was created at a different time, dictated in part by a special lighting effect that caught his attention. All times of day appear in the series, including evening, with a rising moon.  Of course, he couldn’t control the weather, which changed literally from the minute he put his brush to canvas. Working from the memory of the visual effect, the paintings are both prose and poetry - they tell about the scene in front of him, but as in haiku, the color notes of his language draw from memory and from emotions to convey an impression that viewers help to create in their own minds.

One of the first paintings in the series was executed on October 25, 1996.  As he would for each painting, he recorded on a card the time period during which the work was created and his thoughts at the moment.

“Such an unexpected blue cloud hung over the mountain,” he wrote in the case of this work, which was painted at 7:15 a.m.  “To see as an artist can change a life.”

And so began Macpherson’s love affair with the mercurial light and mesmerizing colors and textures of a view he has come to know intimately. Over a four-year period, he came to see the pond as both a complex physiological phenomenon as well as a psychological experience that can only be appreciated in viewing the series as a whole.  In seeing as an artist, Macpherson shows the viewer both continuity and change - a state of constant becoming, as opposed to being…. Life as a process of time.

But this is not simply a series about seeing as an artist.  There can be no translation of the visual experience without feeling.  Intermixed within Macpherson’s eye is his heart.  Emotions emerge in the paintings and are echoed in his commentary. Changes in the pond became a metaphor for changes in his personal life and in life surrounding him:  a heart attack in the family, the death of his companion cat, doubts about his career, the joy of friendships, anger over a neighbor’s ruthless tree cutting.

Viewing the 366 paintings makes a case for the axiom that there is nothing more constant than change … even if most of us fail to notice it.  It’s a heightened awareness we all seek. In Macpherson’s paintings we learn to live in the moment, let go, then look for it again and again.

For more insight into Kevin and his process, please read Jean Stern's introduction for Reflections on a Pond.