Tatashu Farm, Catskills

Jack Stuppin lives and paints in Northern California, but he grew up in Yonkers and returns periodically to his New York roots to paint the mountainous terrain first made famous by Thomas Cole and Asher B. Durand. In fact, this painting vista is in the western Catskills belongs to his Homage to the Hudson River School series.

Though he paints oil studies outdoors, Stuppin seeks to evoke something more than realism in his finished works. Back at his studio, he makes a digitally enlarged version of a favorite plein air painting and uses it as a guide to create a surreal world filled primarily with hues of his own vision and emotional experience. His simplified forms emphasize the solidity and stasis of the topography.