LANDSCAPE PAINTINGS
Painting from the landscape is both exhilarating and downright rugged. Beautiful views may take hours to reach; the sun may be scorching, a thundercloud may burst, or Yikes!, the wind may blow my easel over.
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Yes, these are the hardships of painting on location. But, happily, the effort reaps two excellent benefits; a fine picture to take home, and the opportunity to archive the landscape elements of sky, land, forest, beach, mountain and country road into my visual “database” to re-purpose into the backgrounds of future paintings of imagined spaces.
"Cataract" 30" x 84", Oil on Panel, 2014
CITY OF BILLBOARDS
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The City of Billboards series features urban landscapes with looming, often impossibly-large billboards, seen in fragments, whose real meaning is obscure. For Faigin, the paintings of billboards create pictures within pictures, effectively replacing the sky.
SHELTER
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Like the sanctuary provided by our bodies, the safe haven we feel in our homes can be subject to change without warning. Faigin's Shelter series puts houses on notice that this, too, may pass.
IMAGINERY LANDSCAPES
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The geometry of the man-altered landscape becomes obvious from an airplane, and everyone has been struck, at some point, by its resemblance to modern art or to flags. In Faigin's Imaginary Landscapes perspective, flattened and tipped, becomes a tool to further heighten the visual contradiction between the natural and the unnatural.
PLEIN AIR LANDSCAPES
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Although none of these small, on-location sketches appear in any of Faigin's larger images, decades of working directly from nature provide the underlying landscape vocabulary for his imaginative paintings, such as Still Lifes 1991-2001. Faigin's delight in capturing light and space is apparent throughout the works.
Summers in the SouthWest
Pastel on paper
Summers in the NorthWest
Oil on Panel or Canvas