Don Alden, like a lot of painters, is torn between the awe that is nature and the call of abstraction, of imagination, of even design. These latest paintings represent another breakthrough. The inspiration of landscape has translated directly into the inspiration of painting; painting as reinvention, painting as picture-making, painting as happening. In these new oils Don Alden has claimed the landscape for himself, and in particular the winter landscape. The stark setting brings all of his loves together. It plays to his strengths. It invites him to do what is much in his heart as the landscape itself; it invites him to design.

Don Alden is a conceptualist at heart. He likes the idea of landscapes so much, and the design invites him to dream, to muse, to shape; to shape the landscape to those very dreams and musings. This is his creative bent, and in these new paintings he has achieved that. These new paintings are finally dreamy; his dreamy dreams and they affect us that way. We look at them the way we might walk in our own dreams. We look a them and get lost in his dreams, and that is what painting gives us. That is what painting is all about!