Brian Sweetland (Vermont 1952-2013) Early Spring Woods oil on board 11 x 14" 16 x 19" as framed. Sweetland’s oil paintings of rural Vermont are rendered with a gentle hand. His paintings have the sense of immediacy of the Impressionist tradition, and there’s an underlying compositional architecture that is careful and deliberate and enduring. His subjects are the threatened agricultural landscape, that which is bound to disappear, and he was adept at capturing both its substance and its essence. Pastoral Vermont is depicted lovingly, but not sentimentally; rusted farm equipment hulks under cover of snow; Holsteins squelch in the muddy yard. The tranquility of the scenes is reassuring, and he painted the nuances of favorite places in different ways at different times. Sweetland’s confident hand laid down layers of paint, creating luminous, opalescent effects that please the eye from across a room or right up close. He painted every day, out-of-doors, year-round. As well as the atmospheric light, there is structure; he was a fine draftsman, who's still-lifes have the same delicacy of subject and light touch--the sheen of polished wood, the burnished bowl, the fragile scrap of lace is given the same perceptive attention he gives to the bony angles of a cow’s hip, the shadows that weigh down a cloud or dapple a mountain, the light shimmering on a running river.

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