Brian D. Cohen is a printmaker, painter, educator, and writer. He graduated from Haverford College and completed his MFA in Painting at the University of Washington. In 1989 he founded Bridge Press to further the association and integration of visual image, original text, and book structure. He lives in Kennebunk, Maine.

I returned to painting in oils, my earliest medium, about five years ago when I stopped printmaking for health reasons. I started about 50 small paintings of the landscape near my home in Westmoreland, New Hampshire before I determined to move to Maine and painted over all those landscapes with fresh images of the sea.

In this work, I have depicted the meeting of land and sea, the dramatic boundary of distinct elements -- earth, water, and air – this geographic edge where these domains interpenetrate, absorb, reflect, and contend with each other. It’s why I moved to Maine. I begin my oil paintings with a summary assessment of the key combinations of color in that view and a large brush. These paintings were made over several years in the studio, each one layered with many revisions and reconsiderations until it stands on its own.

My watercolors are done entirely on site and directly from direct observation and reflect that immediacy and sense of discovery. I apply paint into wet paper, timing the drying of the paper as I lay in new washes of color. These paintings have essentially no detail and little incident. I aspire to, as Cézanne once said of his ideal of painting, “...an irradiation and glory of color…a colored state of grace...”