Jacob van Ruisdael (b.1628) was the self-conscious starting point for the gouache paintings.

…It has been said that Turner worshiped van Ruisdael and that Constable adored him from afar. Rarely has anyone been able to capture Presence in landscape as van Ruisdael with perhaps the exception of 19th century Hudson River School painter Frederick Edwin Church. Yet how does one respond to these giants? One needs to look to previous works of art to understand that artists engaged in art criticism and assessment by reaching backward to a predecessor’s syntax, incorporating and transmuting motifs from other formal configurations and thereby make them new…

It is a polemic consistent within the arts. Someone will see my paintings and vaguely find it hearkens back to some other work they have seen. Art does this as artists reflect and rethink previous representations. There isn’t a more persuasive guidance to Ingres than certain drawings done by Goya. The finest critic of Velazques was Picasso whose work can be summed up as a series of analytical re-valuations of seminal western moments. Durer patiently rethought the Flemish masters; Cezannes’ careful transmutations of the planes and volumes were from Piero della Freancesca’s work. Manet’s investigation were of Goya’s masterpieces, Monet’s fragmented dislocations were of Turner’s work and Van Gogh generously transposed Millet’s motifs. Even Wyeth genuflected toward Winslow Homer’s abstract tendencies and the  psychological tensions beneath Edward Hopper’s haunting masterpieces. All internalized their critiques and reproduced with compelling acumen that is unmatched, even today.